Living In Perhaps (13 page)

I read them obsessively, alone in my room, like dirty books.
Pellucid
, now there was a word, and
tormentil
, and
Eocene
. Words
to charm the birds down out of the trees. English-speaking birds,
that is. Lovely, wordy words, words to knock Barbara's vocabulary
into a cocked hat. I savoured the words, and then swallowed them,
letting them slip down my throat like melting chunks of coloured
ice. I savoured them like Murray Mints, like Fruit Spangles, sucking
out all their sweetness, letting their nourishment flow round
my bloodstream and enliven all my cells. To me, those books were
the equivalent of Mandy's shrine of sweets, everything in their
pages to be worshipped and adored.

The following year Bob gave me a belt of gold chain-links, in a
style no longer fashionable. Or
modish
, or
contemporary
, or
topical
, if you like.

I've started going to Group. I'm not sure if this is progress.

Group is always run by someone different. I hazard a guess that
it's the most unpopular job of all. I think there must be a rota
system, and I imagine them up in the staff room saying, 'It
can't
be my turn to run Group. I did it last week!' Or maybe they just
pick straws.

I assume it is a weekly thing.
I
go weekly. Maybe there are
groups taking place all the time, every day, only I'm not in
them.

The first time I went it was run by Mike, a very long thin man
with a faint fluffy beard and a jumper his mother made him. The
sleeves reached his knuckles. He made us all sit round in a circle
and think of one word, one word to sum up how we were feeling.
Of course, it was very tempting to come out with a rude word. In
fact, it was very hard to think of a word that wasn't rude for how
we were feeling, being put on the spot by an idiot whose mother
wasn't even capable of using a tape measure. I looked round at
everyone in Group and decided that an outside observer would
not be able to tell that Mike was any different from the rest of us.
I was only one seat away from him. They started by going in the
other direction, and I just prayed they wouldn't get as far as me
before we had to finish. You didn't have to explain your word if
you didn't want to, you just had to say it. Of course, they all
wanted to explain. Trust the loonies.

The second time I went it was run by Moira, a tiny ant-like
woman with red hair and a Scottish accent. Moira's approach was
quite different. Whereas Mike sat forward in his armchair and
knotted his tense white hands around one shinbone, and urged us
with pleading eyes to come out with something,
anything
, Moira
sat up arrow-straight, her short legs dangling like Goldilocks
perched on Father Bear's chair, her little feet
en pointe
in order to
make contact with the carpet. She wore black ballet shoes, which
rendered the effect that much better. She commanded us with her
fierce darting eyes to say something. And she didn't want just any
old thing. She wanted something full of meaning. You felt likely
to be picked upon. It was just like the old schooldays of spelling
rounds and tables tests. 'Seven sevens – you!' And you would have
to produce the answer to seven sevens, like some miracle, from
out of your empty head.

Fortunately, she never picked me.

These are the people in Group. It is like something out of
Chaucer, or Hieronymus Bosch. There's the Fishwife, the Old
Crone, the Young Crone (they could be mother and daughter,
perhaps they are), Beanpole, Wet Lettuce, Marsupial and me.

The Old Crone has a hooked nose and a chin that's curving up
to reach it, and I can see the Young Crone will go this way, too, in
time. Beanpole is young, perhaps as young as me, but that's all we
have in common. She unfolds herself like one of those expanding
clothes airers when we stand up to leave. But she's always there
before me so I don't have the chance to see her sit down. She's
longer and stringier than Mike, even. His mother's home-knit
jumper might fit her very nicely. Perhaps she's one of these noneaters,
like Hanny. The Fishwife has a voice like a corncrake and is
fond of hearing it. She has a hectoring tone. Mostly it's the group
leader she's hectoring, but sometimes it's herself, or the
Authorities, or God. Wet Lettuce is just that – pathetic, weepy, her
mimsy little-girl voice only just carrying across the vast six or
eight feet of the circle to the rest of us. Marsupial is my favourite.
She's not fat all over, just rather plump, but her belly is huge and
saggy and she lets it swing down between her parted thighs as she
sits, resting it oh-so-gently on the lap of her easy chair. My
conclusion is it's the latest in a series of phantom pregnancies, a
terrible recurring fantasy, and she has the stretch marks to prove
it.

What a happy bunch we are.

I wish Lorna would have to come and run Group. I wish I could
see the Fishwife going on and on at Lorna, not pausing for breath,
not even pausing for thought. I wish she would have to face the
Old Crone, whose infrequent but always enthralling gobbets of
obscenity make Mike swallow, and blink his eyes open very wide.
I wish she would have to deal, all at once, with Wet Lettuce
crumpling into tears and Beanpole twisting her legs round and
round each other agonizingly until some vein is likely to pop,
and Marsupial sighing and giving off that vivid, swampy smell
which she does whenever she's about to speak. Then we'd see what
Lorna's really made of.

But that doesn't seem to be her job. I wish it wasn't
my
job, to
have to sit there with them, to associate with them, be associated
with them. They're clearly not normal people, and some of them
are definitely unhinged.

I always try to keep my mouth shut. I don't want to say anything
untoward.

Yesterday Lorna brought someone else to our little private
session. He sat in the corner, next to the waste-paper basket, and
said nothing. He was like a dormouse, so quiet and self-effacing
that you really could ignore him.

Except that I didn't. I stared at him. We're so starved of events
here – there's nothing much to do, nothing to look at but bad art,
nothing to read but what we glean from other people's leavings –
that it was really quite thrilling to see a new face. At least, that's
how I felt. His hair was such a fine colour that you could hardly
see it, but it was thick and upright, prickling out all over his head
like an American astronaut's, and his eyes were as sad as a
donkey's. He wore tiny steel-framed glasses, perched on the bump
of his narrow nose. His face was unlined, shockingly smooth, just
like a balloon. I've no idea how old he might be. He's one of those
people where you just can't tell.

'Do you mind if I sit in?' he asked, right at the end, as Lorna was
letting me go. I shrugged: too late.
Too late!
I didn't bother saying
it.

He came again today. This time he told me his name is Dr
Travis. Perhaps he's just learning the trade. His voice is soft. He
sits quietly in the corner, with one leg crossed over the other. Or
maybe it's a double act. Lorna's the tough interrogator, and maybe
Dr Travis is to be the gentle one, the one who puts the cigarette to
your cracked lips, only to have the other one knock it away again
with a stinging blow to your jaw. Once Lorna's softened me up,
maybe Dr Travis will let slip some remark, just in passing, gentle
and low. And that's when I'll spill the beans. Out of gratitude at
his kindness. So they hope.

Sometimes he writes in a little notebook with a pencil. His
pencil is miniature, with a gold top. I can see it has a point carved
with a knife, not a point sharpened with a pencil sharpener. I can't
understand people who sharpen their pencils with a penknife. It
doesn't give a decent end. That was something Tillie taught me,
when I was at the kitchen table with the little boys, drawing:
never to put up with anything less than a
sharp point
. Tom heard
her and sniggered. It was all information, but was it
good
information?

There
are
more groups than mine. Hanny just told me that in her
group Rose had talked about giving birth to a baby and killing
it on a rubbish dump. Moira was leading the group and sat
forward on her chair, electrified, pressing her little tiptoes into the
carpet. Hanny said this must be something that Moira hadn't
heard from Rose before, something that wasn't
in the file
. Hanny
said she would have thought Rose was making it up – we're always
making stuff up – but for Moira's reaction. 'I reckon people are
here for more reasons than they give out,' Hanny said. 'I reckon
everyone's here for something really extreme.'

Rose usually sits next to me in Activity. I've never heard her
speak a word. Only those little noises in the back of her throat.
Squeaking, mouse-like noises. I'd like to hear
her
story.

When we were eleven we had to take the test for grammar school.
Naturally, I failed. So did most of my class. We weren't expected
to pass, and we didn't expect to. They didn't train us for it at my
school. They let us rely on luck, and native talent, and most of us
didn't have either of those. We were the whatever-per-cent, the
large but humble majority, who were seen as somehow not
up to
it
. I don't understand how a thumping majority can possibly be
thicker than average; even with my standard of maths, that
doesn't add up. But we opened the envelope and went where we
were told.

Isolde was already at the grammar and Barbara automatically
assumed that she would go there too. She told me so. Tom was at
the boys' equivalent. They had to catch a train to get there.
Barbara liked the idea of getting a train every day. There was a
Paynes Poppets machine on the station platform that sometimes
spewed out your sixpence as well as the packet of sweets. It was
Paynes Poppets and train travel that attracted her to the grammar,
as much as any standard of education she might receive there.

But Barbara didn't get through to grammar school. I could
quite see if she'd spent her whole time making leaf-prints and
dodgy pastry that they wouldn't be interested in taking her, and I
was glad. Now she would have to come to the secondary modern
with me and find out what life was really like. That it doesn't
always – or even often – deal you the hand you wished for.

And if she came to the secondary mod with me, I would have a
ready-made friend. We could spend every day together and breaktimes
would be a cinch.

'Oh no,' she said. 'I'm going to St Mary's. It's a convent school.
We're taught by nuns.'

'Are you a Catholic?' I asked.

'I can be,' she said, shrugging airily.

My mother had a horror of Roman Catholicism. The thought
of nuns teaching biddable children made her shudder visibly with
repulsion. But then I always felt that she went too far with the
things she found repellent, showing off about how sensitive she
was: bacon fat, frogspawn, nuns, women in tight trousers, they all
made her sputter and gag as if poison was being forced down her
throat. Histrionics. I mean, I don't like spiders, but if I see one in
the distance I don't make a point of going over and stamping on
it. Live and let live, that's me.

But nuns and
Barbara
?

'I bet they make you wear uniform.
And
turn up on time.'

'We're going to buy the uniform tomorrow,' she said. She
sounded almost smug.

Her uniform, when we saw it, was very ornate. Tom and Isolde,
whose school outfits were reasonably plain, looked askance.

'Why has your hat got a French revolutionary's rosette on it?'
Tom asked, drily.

'Just don't ask me ever to walk down the road with you,' Isolde
said, folding her arms and turning away, putting her seal on the
matter.

I thought she looked ridiculous. Well, I wanted her to look
ridiculous. This was the Barbara who had sneered at my ordinary
brown check school dress and said that the Wren wouldn't
want
its pupils all looking the same. As if they had some wonderful
essential difference that must at all costs be preserved. And now
she was preserving that difference by getting togged up like a
Parisian Communard. But I didn't dare say anything. You didn't
criticize Barbara. Or, at least,
I
didn't criticize Barbara.

On Sundays here they have a church service. You don't have to
attend, but I think a lot of people go for something to do. The
singing is terrible, but I just sit back on my hard wooden chair
and let the white light wash over me. The windows of the chapel
aren't stained glass, they're
frosted
glass. Not quite the same. Very
non-conformist. Very public lav. I don't bow my head in prayer or
sing the hymns or anything, I just sit. It's terribly relaxing. I never
thought of church as relaxing before.

Perhaps I'll find God again. Or He'll find me.

On Sundays at home we were always very busy. In the morning
we went to the main service, Mum and Brian and I, and Dad if it
was a particular date in the calendar, like Easter or Christmas or
Whit Sunday or Harvest Festival; and in the afternoon Brian and
I were expected to go back again, to Sunday school. Most of the
children who went didn't have to do both. Sunday school was for
little kids who couldn't be trusted to keep quiet during the
sermon. We could be trusted. I had a handbag, a special handbag
just for church, white with a gold metal clasp. I had little white
cotton gloves. I felt very visible, walking down the road. We had
to clean our shoes on Saturday evening, in order to be ready for
church the next day. Brian had to wear a jacket, a fuzzy greenybrown
jacket just like a man's. For year after year we received
mind-improving books on prize-giving day, because our
attendance was exemplary.

Then adolescence hit.

I began to feel resentful, about the little handbag, the prissy
gloves, all the fuss about getting ready as if God could see us, as if
God could spot the dirty fingernail, the unbrushed collar, as
if God was petty enough to get enraged about such things. I began
to chafe at the endless, endless hours sitting there, being
exemplary children, perfect church-goers.

It was Barbara's shifty attitude to religion that first got under
my skin, like a worm, writhing away and making me itch and
twitch. A hideous disease-bearing African worm, the kind we
heard about when missionaries came to talk to us about their farflung
duties. With colour slides.

If Barbara could be, at one and the same time, a little heathen
who spent her Sundays running about barefoot in the garden,
playing swingball and It and tennis when God-fearing folk were
in church, and yet be counted as religious enough to be taught by
nuns, what was the meaning of it all? Some people seemed to be
able to have it both ways, when it suited them. I just didn't understand.
I began to wonder how
I
could have it both ways, how
I
could wriggle out of my obligations without paying a price.

'Patrick's a Catholic,' Barbara told me, 'and Catholics have to
swear when they get married that they will raise their children
to be good Catholics as well.'

'What about Tillie?' I asked. 'What's she?'

'Oh, Tillie's a Protestant. Dutch people are.'

'I mean, what if she doesn't want you to be brought up a good
Catholic?' I had in mind my mother, shuddering at nuns. What if
my father had been a Catholic? How would she have managed?

Barbara shrugged.

'And what about all the others, Tom and Eugene and everyone?
Are they good Catholics? If they are, it doesn't show.'

Barbara thought about this, rolling her tongue over her
exposed teeth like a horse. 'They are, but underneath. I'm the
visible representative.'

'What, like – you're Jesus and they're the Holy Ghost?'

I had her there. Barbara, having spent all her Sundays playing
poker and tennis, had no theology whatsoever.

So I went off to my new school, and Barbara went off to hers,
braided and beribboned and decorated like a soldier in a
particularly heroic army.

She made a friend there. She hadn't had a particular friend at
the Wren, she'd said they were all too stupid or deranged to
warrant her attention. I saw her walking back with this girl. They
climbed down off the bus at the same place, and I saw them walking
along with that slow walk which means you have more to say
to each other than will fit into the space before you have to go
your separate ways. I felt a stab of jealousy, quite unlike anything
I'd felt before. It wasn't the dull ache that came when the girls at
junior school cold-shouldered me. The two of them stood on the
corner talking for a few minutes, then pulled away, and both
began walking more quickly in different directions. I didn't know
whether to catch her up or not. I trailed behind her like a spy,
slowing my pace, ducking into the shadow of the hedge, holding
my breath when she turned her head to glance both ways before
crossing the road.

'Caro, what the hell are you doing? Get over here!'

Her voice was peremptory. She must have glimpsed me out of
the corner of her eye. I stood up straight and walked towards her,
my breath catching stickily somewhere in my ribs. When I got
within reach she grabbed my arm, hard, and pulled me towards
her.

'Come on, you idiot. Stop avoiding me. I want to know everything
about your stupid day. Don't leave anything out.'

So I thought perhaps this new friend wasn't so important. I
thought perhaps it would be all right.

'Secondary school now, eh?' my aunt Gloria said to me, on the
first Sunday after term began. 'Very grown-up.'

I replied with just a painful grin, all stretched lips and no teeth.

'Bet they work you hard there?'

Well, no, actually. Not as you'd notice. Not yet awhile, anyway.

'No orange squash for Carol,' Gloria said to Stella, who'd just
come into the room and hadn't a clue what this badinage was
about, or even that it was badinage. 'Too much the young lady
these days. A nice cup of tea for Carol. Or would you rather have
coffee
?'

Stella mugged me a look. I mugged back. I think it was the first
time we had ever exchanged any real form of communication.

'Didn't call it a secondary modern in my day,' said Gloria.

'Holloway Prison, more like,' Stella muttered.

'East End Lane School was its actual name,' Gloria told her, 'as
well you know. You were three forms behind me.'

My mother sat quietly through all this. She wasn't an expert on
education. I guess she had gone to some other school, some even
more hopeless country school where everyone sat squashed into
the same room and did their dismal best. She didn't mention
where.

'And how're you getting on at school?' Gloria would ask, every
so often. I felt she did this for form's sake. I guessed she wanted a
multiple-choice answer: (a) very well, thanks, (b) fine, thanks,
(c) not too bad, thanks very much for asking. I guessed she wasn't
enquiring about the curriculum, or the school's approach to
discipline, or hoping to delve into my exercise books.

And at home it was 'Have you started your homework yet?' and
'Have you
finished
your homework yet?', with regular inspections
through the serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining
table. I spread out my books. I sharpened my pencils. I must have
had the sharpest pencils in the school. If there had been a prize for
that I would have got it, year after year. I scratched my scalp with
my sharply pointed pencils and wondered about the effects of
graphite in the brain. And then the hatch doors would snap open
and my mother's face would appear, breaking off from the
washing-up. 'Carol!' The only way she knew how to enquire about
school was to monitor the homework production line. But if I
said I'd done it, and slapped my book firmly shut, she would nod
and pull the hatch doors closed, and in a minute or two emerge,
without her apron, and switch on the wireless and sit down to
knit. And if I said I was off out to Mildred Clark's (Mildred
Clark's!), to work on a joint history project, she would
nod grimly, as if this was only proper, and add, 'Don't be late
back.'

'We have to get it finished. It's due in tomorrow. Mildred's
mother says she'll give me a lift home.'

I enjoyed the odd rococo lie. It was naughty, really. I relied on
the arcane mysteries of the educational system to keep her in
thrall. Maybe I wanted her to say, 'Hang on a minute, Carol.' I
waved my lies aloft, like the red rag to the bull, but without
success. The bull was disappointingly docile. It stood in the far
corner of the field and turned its little, stupid eye away.

One good thing about secondary school: suddenly I was
allowed to venture much further afield. My mother no longer
bothered to throw a limit around the neighbourhood. Out of
sight, I was out of mind. Once you could get on a bus unsupervised
you could conquer the world, and there wasn't
anything anyone could do to stop you.

Because the convent school was out of town, Barbara had to get
a special bus to it. The rest of us used ordinary public transport.
I would see the convent girls, in their sky-blue and navy and
brassy gold braid, waiting in groups at special corners. There were
no proper bus stops for them, just appointed places that they, and
the bus drivers, knew about. It felt like a coded world, a world that
excluded me.

'I can't play right now, I've got prep,' the new, serious Barbara
said to me, when I called round. 'Don't you have prep? We have an
hour each evening, minimum.' Well, I had
homework
, but it was
rather patchy, and my teachers said they were going to let us take
it easy at first. Break us in gently. Ten minutes to start with, maybe
fifteen. Working up to as much as half an hour. They let us take it
easy for a long time. I don't think they relished marking books at
my school.

'I must change out of my tunic first,' she said, another time,
standing at the top of their steps, while I straddled my bike on the
path below. Her tie was still firmly knotted, her cuffs buttoned
and clean. Could this be Barbara, who never even knew what she
had on, who turned cartwheels in dresses, displaying her knickers,
who stuck her hands right through the torn pockets of her shorts
and waved them at me to make me laugh?

'We do Latin. Do you do Latin yet?' she asked, in a tone of voice
that made me think she already knew the secondary mod drew
the line at Latin.

I began to wonder if it was worth even trying to stay friends.
But after a few weeks she got bored, and the old Barbara
reasserted itself.

'Bloody nuns!' she said, running down the road to catch up
with me, taking my upper arm in her hard, pinching fingers.