Living In Perhaps (10 page)

'You're a good observer,' Lorna said to me this morning. 'You're
observant, and you've got a good mind.'

Oh, thank you, Lorna. Thank you! How kind of you to let me
know.

Well, Lorna, here's what I observe.

You are plain, and short. I hate short people. You sit with your
little legs tucked neatly beneath your skirt, calves together, as I
imagine you've done since schooldays. You wear ginger lace-up
Hush Puppies, in a broad fitting. They still crease up over the
widest part of your foot. I would say you have corns. Working
upwards from the feet: your tights are cream, always the same
shade. Do you buy them in bulk? Never take a chance on
Chocolate, or Bermuda Beige? You wear, every time I see you,
either a black skirt or one in light and dark brown tartan against
some intermediate shade that I'm not even interested in finding a
name for. You smooth down your skirt when you sit, and again
when you stand. You wear a beige twinset, or a yellow jumper
with lacy panels down the front which reveal layers of underwear.
If you're going to go for teasing lacy panels, what's the point of a
petticoat and a huge bra and maybe even something else underneath?
The bra is one of those ones that come up to the armpits,
and the tops of the cups almost up to the shoulders. I know, it's
the sort Bettina had to resort to, to hold everything
in
and
up
.
Sometimes I can see a gold locket round your neck; sometimes it
must be tucked inside. You wear no rings, not even a fleshy
diamond like Rose in Activity. Your complexion is pale and puffy.
You favour just a dab of green eyeshadow, and lip-coloured lipstick.
Your hair is coarse, with so many grey hairs in it that it's
turning from black to pinstriped. You have a pony's fringe and
two heavy wings of hair to your chin. It makes you look terrible.
Yet you take such great care of your hair. It's always immaculately
cut and immaculately combed, this great thick Cleopatra's wig of
a hairstyle. Whatever for? It doesn't suit you at all. And I do know
what I'm talking about. Don't forget, I am related to a second
stylist.

Only I never told you that, did I?

Oh, and you always smell of some faint, sweet, cloying scent.
Some man, years ago, must have said, 'Oh, Lorna, what a lovely
perfume,' and you believed him. You didn't think he was just passing
the time, or flattering you to get you to do something he
couldn't be bothered to do himself, in the domestic or the bureaucratic
field. You always wear that scent.
My
scent, you probably
think, as you dab the stopper behind your ears and on your wrists,
and you glance to see how low the bottle's getting.

See, aren't I a careful observer? Mind like a razor, too.

The gardens here are very neat. Big bland lawns, long straight
flower beds, filled with all the same thing – butter-coloured tulips
or sky-blue forget-me-nots – as if someone had taken a single
colour and poured it out into a paint tray. Along the front of the
building, which is white, lies a bandage of blood-red tulips.

Maybe it's to help the gardeners concentrate their minds. They
don't look all there, to me.

The Hennessys' garden was a total mess. Mr Van Hoog, freed
from straight nursery rows once he was retired, liked to throw the
plants in all together, letting them fight it out. The front garden
was heady with lavender and sprawling roses whose long stems
were bent back down to the earth in thorny hoops. There were
leaves mottled and splashed as though paint had been thrown at
them, and flowers shaped like snapdragons, although I could see
that they weren't just simple antirrhinums. Tom told me their
names once and I thought I would remember them because it was
him that told me. But I was bewitched by the shape of his mouth
as he pronounced the unfamiliar words, and barely registered the
names of the flowers.

In the back garden, the children ruled the space. There was
lawn to the side and the back of the house, an overgrown
shrubbery (which was what I had crawled through when I
breached the hedge), the old tennis court, and finally the orchard
and vegetable patch. Mr Van Hoog wasn't interested in grass and
let it grow any old how, so long as someone occasionally cut it.
The pitted lawn was full of moles. The little boys liked to creep up
and jump on the molehills, as if they stood a chance of crushing
the mole skulls just beneath. But Mr Van Hoog would wave them
off and come hurrying over with his trowel to scoop up the mole-heap
spoil, which made excellent potting compost, so Barbara
told me.

There was a field that ran down the far side of the back garden,
a bitten-down field, more brown than green. A donkey lived in it,
and a sunk-backed pony like a settee with the springs gone. They
belonged to a Mr Jenkins, a squat little man just as unkempt and
stout and bandy as his animals. He kept them for his grandchildren
to ride and every so often would come with a couple of
halters and lead the two creatures away.

'Why don't you ask if you can ride them?' I said to Barbara.

'Wouldn't want to,' she replied, carelessly. 'They're vicious.
They bite.' And to prove it she shot out a hand over the fence
towards the pony's neck. It pressed its ears back and showed us
long, yellow, wicked-looking teeth. But sometimes I spotted the
others feeding them. I saw the little boys rip up handfuls of lush
garden grass and hold them, palms flat, under the animals' noses.
Without painful results. And I remembered reading somewhere –
was it in
A Pony for Patricia
? – that you should never go to pat a
horse behind its line of sight; they couldn't see what was going on
and it made them anxious. So what was Barbara trying to prove?

The Hennessys' garden was a paradise of disorder. You could
look out on to the field and the trees, and the big hedge blocked
all view of the road and the rest of the houses. Not a post-and-link
fence or a garden gnome or a bungalow in sight. Which was
exactly how they liked it.

Sometimes I walk with Hanny in the gardens here. It's usually
sunny, but the wind's still cold. She wears a burgundy velvet dress
with bell-shaped sleeves to hide her knobbly wrists, and a hooded
coat made out of tapestry material. The tip of the hood has a long
silky tassel, in dirty gold, just like something you might find in a
church. She looks like a vampire, but still she makes me feel my
clothes are wrong, and dull.

I have an Aran sweater, and a pair of jeans worn milky-white at
the creases. I wear boots, or a pair of dirty tennis shoes. I thought
I had just got them to the perfect pitch of dirtiness, but now I'm
not so sure. I only wear the sweater when I go outside. Inside they
always have the heating on and it's so hot and stuffy. Makes you
feel quite ill. It's April now and I wonder if they are ever going to
turn the heating off. You need to get out into the gardens to be
able to breathe properly.

I don't wear any make-up. I never have. It has always looked
stupid on me, making my face seem like a mask, like a painted-up
doll. And, anyway, I don't like all those handy-sized pots and
tubes, the way they're displayed in shops like penny sweets, pick
'n' mix. Too handy-sized. Take one – what's gone? – very hard to
spot the missing item. Just like Kim's game. I was very good at
Kim's game when I was a Brownie. Always could spot what had
gone missing.

Some days Hanny wears thick black gook on her long black
lashes. I don't know why she bothers, it just makes her look as if
she's blinked into blackcurrant jam. But there are people who can
hardly step out of bed without their make-up. They feel naked
without it. They feel humiliated if people catch them with just
their own faces on.

I showed the magazine quiz to Hanny yesterday. We had a good
laugh about it.

Question ten: 'When choosing a birthday present for your best
friend, would you (a) Shop for hours then end up buying something
you'd really like yourself ? (b) Grab some chocs or flowers at
the last minute? (c) Buy her something practical you know she
needs? or (d) Give her a special home-made gift?'

'Chocs,' said Hanny. 'Bloody hell.
Chocs!
'

All the answers presuppose that the reader is someone with
loads of time and money, and overflowing with vague but loving
thoughts. A kind of empty goodwill.

Hanny suggested, 'Maybe the quiz is called "Are you a Dippy
Hippie or a Hard-faced Bitch?"'

Where are the real-life alternatives?

(a) You and your friend never exchange gifts.

(b) You pretend, convincingly, that you didn't know it was her
birthday.

(c) You steal something.

(d) You don't have a best friend.

That first time when Hanny asked me my name, I paused and
then said, 'Coral.' That was a new one, wasn't it?

When I was about ten I started to grow really fast. I began to shoot
up, as they always put it. Like some plant getting thin and leggy
for want of light and outgrowing its space. My mother was tall. I
said, 'I must take after Mum,' when one of the aunts commented
on my height. And then, because I saw Gloria give me a quick,
dazed look – a hurt sort of look, or so I thought – I added, 'But
I've got Dad's eyes.' It was true, I had wide-set eyes like Dad and
Gloria and Stella, the chilly blue of roughened water.

So I knew I was lying when I told Barbara, 'I'm an orphan. I'm
adopted. I'm not
really
their child.' I did it because I didn't want
to seem
suburban
.

'Are you? Are you really?' said Barbara. 'I've never met anyone
who's adopted before.' And for the first time in ages she looked at
me with a gleam of real interest in her eye. 'Why?'

'Why what?'

'Why were you adopted?'

'
I
don't know!' I said indignantly. I hadn't got this far in my
thinking. I was only just beginning to appreciate what a
dangerous field I had strayed into. Of course, on the one hand, I
kind of thought I
was
adopted, wished I was, believed that somehow
I deserved something better than the family I had. But, on
the other hand, my rational self knew it was inevitable that I
hadn't been, that the genetic make-up I saw all around me at
breakfast, and particularly at tea-time on those Sunday visits, was,
of course, my destiny and my doom.

'Who are your real parents, then?' Barbara asked.

'
I
don't know. How
should
I know? I was adopted at birth,' I said
firmly. And I had a vision of the moment, some poor labouring
woman lying back on a bed and a newborn baby, me, neatly
trussed in snow-white sheets, being passed into the eager hands of
my waiting parents. I hadn't a clue back then what really
happened in childbirth. All I knew about was Little Lord Jesus and
his swaddling bands. Funnily enough, the woman on the bed
looked a bit like I used to imagine a Carolyn sort of mother would
look, with her long fair hair all loose and her pretty face scrubbed
of make-up.

I couldn't see any likeness to Tillie in Mr and Mrs Van Hoog. I
found them both repellent, and alarming. Maybe she had their
light-coloured eyes, but what else was there? She was bird-boned
and her face had a sculpted look. They were both short and fat. I
hate short people. I hate
fat
people.

We didn't have grandparents in my family – Brian and I had
none, Mandy had none – so I had no idea what to expect of them.
I didn't know how to behave around them, so I dodged into the
shadows and hung back.

Mr Van Hoog seemed to have taken on the role of an irascible
park-keeper and treated the children like a pack of delinquents
who haunted and teased him at his work. 'Get out! Get out of it!'
he would cry, in his funny accent, and he'd growl and shake the
tines of his fork at them, or pretend to sweep them out of the way
with his broom. But they just rose to his challenge, loving it, waiting
till he was looking their way and then jumping on the newly raked
earth of his flower beds. When his back was turned they would steal
his tools and hide them under bushes, or empty the watering can he
had just filled. And then run away, laughing. With Isolde it was
different. She was never naughty. So he called Isolde 'my princess',
and ushered her round with an elaborate courtly air.

Outdoors, he was usually busy in the garden. Sometimes he
would take a break and sit on his side of the veranda and smoke
a pipe. But sometimes I followed Barbara indoors to look for her
grandmother, into those quiet rooms where the sunlight had to
lever itself at a steep angle over the hedge. And then we might
come across him, sitting absolutely still and silent in a chair, his
hands on the arms, his eyes open. Barbara didn't hesitate to perch
on the arm of his chair and peck him on the cheek. I couldn't
believe she would do this. It was as repellent as kissing a corpse in
a coffin. He might very well
be
dead. He looked dead to me, or
comatose at the very least, sitting there, unmoving, not dozing
or reading or smoking his pipe. I don't know why he sat there like
that. When I asked, Barbara would say, 'Oh, it's OK, he's just
thinking.' Which really didn't explain it.

I was glad I didn't have a grandfather.

Barbara's grandmother liked to do embarrassing things. Once
Tillie was sitting on the steps with Mattie between her knees,
singing in her high and rather untuneful voice: 'All the ducks are
swimming in the water, Fa-la la-la li-lo, fa-la la-la li-lo ...' And
when she stopped Mrs Van Hoog clapped her hands together, just
like someone in the audience at a concert, as if Tillie had done
something special. But all she was doing was singing a nursery
rhyme, rather badly at that.

Mrs Van Hoog always had to be patting and pulling at the children,
praising and complimenting them, squeezing them for
kisses. She was the one, not Tillie, who smoothed down Barbara's
hair, tucked in her blouse, or cried, 'Give me that skirt – it needs
an iron,' or 'Just let me catch up that hem,' to which Barbara
always replied by darting away. Oma responded to defiance by
chuckling with laughter, like a mad old witch who couldn't tell
good from bad. She loved to feed her grandchildren sweets and
peel apples for them, carve slices like petals and post them into
their mouths. And they'd just gape like baby birds and let it
happen.

Barbara and the little boys willingly put up with all this, but
with the older ones she had to be more circumspect. Tom just
sloped away out of reach, slithering from her grasp, and she dared
not offend Isolde's imperial dignity by poking and pressing her.
She treated Isolde like a gracious, timid animal, a rare species of
deer, who might be enticed into the open if only we were all still
enough, quiet enough, beguiling enough. She offered food by
holding the plate high, temptingly: 'Izzy, come try these? I made
them for
you
.' And then, of course, all the starching and ironing
and fine sewing appealed to Isolde's sense of propriety, and she
was willing to allow Oma the privilege of looking after her
clothes. She would stand waiting impatiently, with no air of
gratitude, while Oma sank the point of her iron into the folds of
a gathered sleeve. I had even seen Isolde sit while Oma slid one
polished shoe after the other on to her feet, like the assistant in the
children's department at Clark's. To the two of them, grandfather
and grandmother, Isolde was a combination of the Sun King and
a fairy princess. It was useful to me to see that even the Hennessy
children weren't all equal; how one child could be treated completely
differently from the others, not because she was special,
but for the simple reason that she thought she was special. Maybe
this was Mandy's secret weapon.

I don't know what Brian's was. Yes, I do. He was a
boy
.

It seems to me that this is one of the major things you learn in
childhood: that not all families are like your family. You start out
thinking that the way it happens round your tea table is the template
for the universe. What else could there be? Gradually, by exposure,
you get to learn some very strange things: that some people have
parsley sauce with their fish, not everyone heats the milk for the
coffee, and the father of the family may belch in public and even
then fail to be censured by an embarrassed wife. The father taps his
sternum, the wife carries on knitting, the coffee sits lukewarm in the
cups. How extremely weird. And then you begin to wonder – is
belching and cold coffee and parsley sauce the normal thing? What
is
the normal thing? Knitting and silence? Bickering and manners?
Maybe it's a lifetime's work to sort it all out.

All I know is, at the time, I was frightened of Barbara's grandparents.
Not because what they did was necessarily frightening at
all, but just because it was unknown, strange. I was afraid that Mr
Van Hoog would growl at me, or even worse, that Mrs Van Hoog
would wrap me in a hot embrace and force a segment of orange
between my lips. They revolted me – their bodies, their clothes,
their habits. Even the way Barbara's grandmother turned an apple
under her knife with dizzying speed was foreign to me. We did
not peel apples by that method in
my
circle.

I needn't have worried. They never did do anything unwarranted
to me. It was as if they couldn't even see me. I was
under a spell, enchanted. I could wander about, unhindered, like
a little ghost.

Lorna asks, 'What did they tell you about the adoption? I mean,
your mother and father.'

'My
adopted
mother and father?' I'm a stickler, but polite with
it. I'm always polite to Lorna. My mother would be proud of me.
I think the politeness is driving Lorna up the wall. One can only
hope.

'Your adopted mother and father, yes.'

I think about this. 'Not much,' I say. She pauses to make a little
note.

This is the worst thing, this making of little notes! Sometimes
you say something that sounds as if it should be quite important,
vital even, and she just sits there, hands unoccupied, and lets you
go on. But say something stupid, or pointless, and there it goes,
pen to paper, squiggle, squiggle, squiggle. What the hell is she
writing? What the hell does she
know
?

That's why you should never say anything. Make it up. Tell lies.
Hanny agrees with me.

'We're the only two sane people in this place, and I don't
exclude the staff,' she said. 'We have to protect ourselves.'

'That's all right, I'm an incorrigible liar,' I told her.

'Incorrigible. I like that word.'

'I've always been a liar. No, that's not true.' I tried to explain,
but Hanny threw her head back and laughed silently, her throat
quivering.

'If you're like this in group sessions, you'd drive
me
mad,' she
said, when she could speak again.

'What I mean is that I started off small, just making excuses. Or
being evasive.'

'Everyone does that,' said Hanny.

'But later on you need bigger excuses – proper lies – because
you're up to bigger things. You've got more to cover up.'

Hanny gave me her moody sideways glance, and hugged her
knees. We were sitting on our usual bench, and she stuck out her
chin and propped it on her bony kneecaps and began to look
stubborn. 'What's all this?' she asked, staring ahead of her. 'You're
not working up to the big confession, are you? Because I can tell
you straight off, I'm not interested in anything like that.'

'No, I'm not.' I hoped I sounded indignant, but my voice came
out all tight. I coughed to free it. 'I'm just giving you the benefit
of my technique.
If
you want to hear it.'

It was the first time I'd stood up to Hanny. I might run Lorna
ragged and have fun in the process, but then she was the implacable
opposition, not my friend.

A beat of silence, a long, long beat. Then: 'OK, go on.'

'What I find with lying,' I said, and leaned my head back against
the wall: warming up now, relaxing. If there was one thing Hanny
and I both enjoyed, it was theorizing. '
Successful
lying, that is – it's
keep it small. Keep it modest. Being a big, flash liar is like walking
on a tightrope – too easy to slip off somewhere along the
way. What I tend to find is that you don't have to give them much.
Just the bare minimum will do. Don't pile it on unnecessarily,
you'll only end up forgetting some of the things you've
said. It's amazing what you
don't
have to say to get away with
it.'

'Maybe they were never really listening in the first place?'

'Maybe.'

'Didn't care what you were covering up, so they didn't care how
you did it?'

'Maybe.' I could feel my voice tightening up again. 'But not in
here. Here, they're
fascinated
.'

'I prefer a dirty great lie, myself. It's more fun.' Hanny
unclasped her knees and began picking at a mark on one of her
crushed velvet trouser legs. 'When faced with the bitter truth, use
bluff, bullshit, injured innocence. But that's just me. Everyone's
got their own methods. And nobody's owning up. Not really.
Whatever they say in Group.'

What I think is that everybody in this whole place is spinning
some kind of fabulous tale, and Lorna and her colleagues are
lapping it up, noting it down.

In the little room where we meet, Lorna and I, there is one
picture. One small square picture plonked right in the middle of
the wall. Its colours are so faint and wishy-washy they might
almost not be there. There are overlapping circles, blobs of pale
blue and green and pink, as if someone had dipped a pen in
coloured inks and let them drip on to wet – very wet – paper.
Perhaps it's designed to calm us down. But if, like me, you're used
to more robust forms of art, it just makes your blood boil.

Like the Van Hoogs' side, the Hennessys' side of the house was
full of pictures. Pictures of people, rather than flowers and fruit
bowls and fields of corn. There was Tillie naked and Tillie dressed,
and people I didn't recognize, doing ordinary things – bending
over a kitchen table, sitting and reading, cutting wood, even
people painting other paintings. Up the stairway there were
portraits of the children. Someone I thought was Sebastian, a
round-headed boy with a sweet protuberant lip, crouching and
playing in the sand: this was Eugene, so Barbara told me. He had
the family likeness. There were two little girls on a swing-seat:
herself and Isolde when younger. Then a strange one of Tom with
a bluish face, making him look rather pinched and cruel, and
another of Isolde sitting with her feet tucked up on the sofa in the
front room, turning the page of a big picture book. It was odd to
see paintings of people I knew, especially if they didn't have their
clothes on, but somehow even odder to see them of objects and
rooms I recognized. The woman standing at a table was using
Tillie's blue striped mixing bowl, and a fat black-haired man sat
on the veranda of this very house. The paintings of the children
were conventional enough, I suppose, but Patrick had laid the
paint on in thick unyielding layers, had made the colours uncompromising,
the blurriness of their features like them and yet
not like. Isolde and Barbara on the swing were almost creepy,
Barbara's eyes just dots and dabs of near-black, unaligned. Her
expression was of boredom, and rebellion. But then how could
that slab of grey-brown-pink, those curranty dots for eyes, be said
to have an expression?