Living In Perhaps (15 page)

I had no sense of premonition as I stood there, breathing in the
dry-cleaning fumes. I didn't foresee my future, interchangeable
with that of the girl behind the counter, the glum-looking, slow-off-the-mark
girl. But then I never seem to have a clue what's in
store for me.

Roy Tiltyard turned out to be a short man with absolutely no
chin. 'Weedy little thing, isn't he?' was Stella's verdict, as she
watched him from the sidelines. Her voice was tinged with knowledge,
like a trainer sizing up rival horseflesh. But he was a man,
and he was marrying Bettina, so all in all I think the family felt
she'd got a good deal. By November Bettina was terribly plump,
pinkly plump, and her hair full of electricity. She wore a whitish
suit, ivory they called it, and a perky little hat with a net veil, and
a spray of apricot carnations on her sizeable breast. In her high
heels she was about four inches taller than the groom. I kept
thinking about what I'd learned from all those novels, and how on
their wedding night she would overlap and overflow his skimpy
form. How she could, easily, quite overpower him. He looked
pretty cheerful, despite this. I imagined her casting off her wedding
hat, kicking off her high heels, and splitting the zip at the
back of her skirt in her eagerness, while he lay on the bed in his
wedding suit, his lower lip disappearing into his neck, smiling a
nervous smile. I know I've read far too many unsuitable books,
but it was difficult to get from
here
– stilted speeches and laughter
in the back room of the Bull and Garland pub, my mother drinking
bitter lemon with a lemon-puckered expression on her face
because she didn't hold with public houses – to
there
, a riotous
consummation in a hotel room up the coast, in only a few hours'
time, while the rest of us were drinking our bedtime hot chocolate
and examining the sore places on our feet where our new shoes
had rubbed.

I found it the hardest thing to imagine, how people got on in
private. How they really got on.

Mandy wore shocking pink. It clashed with her hair.

In the back room at the Bull and Garland pub, a place of quite
unfamiliar smells and sensations, I watched my relatives and Roy
Tiltyard's relatives. It wasn't often that an opportunity like this
came my way. I made full use of my powers of observation. Ladies
with fat bottoms (the Tiltyard side) capered in the middle of the
room, doing some version of a country dance, arm in arm and
round and round, to Lonnie Donegan on the jukebox. I wondered
which one was Roy's auntie, so recently under the knife. They all
looked in the rudest health. Their tight skirts, in electric blue and
sugar pink, wrinkled spectacularly over their thighs. I thought I
could hear the creak of their girdles above the music. Whereas my
side of the family sat primly behind the small round tables, knees
together, holding up their glasses as if about to make a toast. They
looked as if enjoyment did not come naturally to them. Stella was
subdued. The men (both sides) stood in huddles near the bar, or
near to the door marked 'Toilets'. My father was letting his half of
light ale go a long way. He wasn't, as my mother said, 'a drinker'.
Nor was he likely to be, under her eagle eye.

I leaned my head towards Gloria and said, under cover of the
music, 'What happened to Mandy's father?' Gloria was the one
person you might ask, she had a taste for gossip, and whatever was
in her glass was beginning to make her go loose-featured and giggly.

'Mandy's father? Oh, he was killed in a motorcycle accident,
years ago.'

So he had actually existed. Bettina had not produced Mandy in
isolation, like some self-pollinating flower, or a greenfly giving
birth to replica female greenflies. '
Eleven
years ago!' she said, and
went off into a spasm of laughter, her shoulders shaking. I
couldn't see what was funny about this. Mandy was eleven,
almost.

'He always went too fast on that awful motorbike,' Gloria continued.
'Sometimes she rode pillion. Used to give her poor mother
the willies.' So Bettina had a mother at one time, too. 'After he got
killed, she used to refer to him as her fiancé. I can't blame her, it
sounds better, doesn't it? Anyway, there she was, in the club. Never
trust men on motorcycles.' And she burst into laughter again. I
wondered if she meant a motorcycle club, which was no good if
you didn't have a motorcycle to ride on any more.

They have a patients' lounge here which we are supposed to use
for 'socializing'. Now there's a word. What image does it conjure
up? Little groups in vibrant conversation, the clink of bone-china
cups. Even – at a pinch – something fun and genteel, like a tea
dance, or early evening cocktails. Greetings trilled across the
room, a white hand waving and beckoning over the crowd. A ginsling
for me, please, darling! Another rum punch over here!
Perhaps that's just the sort of thing that went on in this big,
elegant room once upon a time, before the whole place was
transformed.

The lounge is ringed with Scandinavian-modern chairs upholstered
in bobbly tweed. To feel comfortable in one of these
chairs you would need to be about seven foot tall, with no back
problems and preferably no head, for the backrest reaches no
higher than the shoulder blades. You would want abnormally long
arms, but plump ones too, for the bare wooden armrests are hard
on elbow and wrist bones. The chair cushions come in four
colours: burnt orange, sludge green, brown and beige. Blue is still
my favourite colour, I'm afraid, so no luck here. There are about
twenty of these armchairs, plus some plastic stacker chairs placed
around the walls. In the centre of the room is a circular coffee
table which no one ever puts anything on. Not even coffee.

There are no seven-foot-tall inmates with bloated arms. Only
the usual happy crowd. I'd rather stay in my room, but they don't
like it. They like you to come in here and
socialize
. I look around
for Hanny, but she isn't here. She's never here. Perhaps she's got
some activity or session or something on at this time of day.
Perhaps there's a non-eaters' group which she has to attend. I
don't know. She's never said.

I choose an orange chair and slide into it. There's no choice but
to slide, to slump, in these things. My mother would be horrified.
And almost everyone fiddles with the upholstery, their fingers
twitching along the arms searching for extra-large bobbles or
loose threads to pull at. They're great ones for fiddling, twisting,
turning, rubbing, scratching, scraping, here. I glance about and
recognize Rose, and Marsupial, and the Young Crone. I recognize
others, too, but they haven't got names. I can't be bothered to give
them all names. Nobody ever introduces you, yet they'd really
rather like it if we socialized.

And here comes Mike, wheeling in the television. It's a big old-fashioned
set in a wooden case, perched on top of a trolley,
wheeled in and then wheeled out again. There are only certain
programmes we're allowed to watch, at certain times. Nature programmes,
and some regional thing about country crafts and
willow warblers and restored water mills. Nice safe stuff, so they
think. But have they ever watched these wildlife programmes?
Don't they realize the precise
nature
of these fluffy creatures in
their attractive rural settings? It certainly is a jungle out there,
with big beasts jumping on smaller ones, the swift dragging down
the slow, the halt, the lame, even – and especially – the cute little
baby ones. Another poor wildebeest bites the dust. There always
has to be someone at the back of the herd, one whose unlucky day
it is. A family of lions chew under the stripy haunch of a zebra. Its
leg bounces gamely in the savannah wind, almost as if it were still
alive and kicking. Perhaps it is.

Mike has left the room. Mike has popped out. Doesn't he know
what's going on in here, what murder and mayhem? Nature red in
tooth and claw, vividly imaginable even on black-and-white telly.

The woman in the chair next to me is rocking back and forth.
Her strawy hair hangs over her face. I keep catching sight of her
out of the corner of my eye. The TV switches its attention to small
venomous things, things which dart and dive and shoot and
spring twenty times their own length, catapulting out extravagant
tongues, injecting and hauling and engulfing their victims in
lethal webs, turning the internal organs of their prey to liquid
before slowly ingesting them. Good grief. The woman next to me
has begun to make a noise, a low, rhythmic, keening noise.
Whether it's to do with what's happening on the screen or what's
happening inside her head is impossible to know. No one else
seems to notice. They go on picking at the bobbly tweed of their
seat cushions, examining their hands, gazing blankly at the
television. Marsupial lets out one of her huge impatient sighs.

Then it happens. My neighbour shrieks. You might almost
think it is a macaw or a monkey, some background noise to
the jungle warfare going on in front of our eyes, except for the
volume. And how long it goes on for. She doesn't stop. She's
grabbing the arms of her chair and swinging her body back and
forth wildly, and screaming,
screaming
, at the top of her voice.

Mike pops back in.

Mike pops back in, looking like he's been shot, and dashes out
again to summon help. Two assistants in white nylon – not the
would-be friendly, civvies-clad likes of Moira or Trudy, this is
the heavy mob – dive into position on either side of her chair,
and the blonde woman is lifted bodily in the air. She shrieks again.
The brief silence, the cessation between one scream and the next,
is as ear-piercing as the noise itself. I slither round like an eel out
of my chair and out of the way. I certainly don't want to be caught
up in any of this. What on earth is she up to? Making an
exhibition of herself ! And us.

She flings herself sideways, out of their grasp, and as she hits
the floor she starts banging her head, lifting it and banging it back
down on the green carpet, as if her neck is a stalk and her head's
a flower bobbing about in the breeze. But one of the assistants is
kneeling astride her now and the other one gets her head, and
between them they hold her still, and then something –
something
– happens. She goes limp. Mike hovers above them. They pick her
up and carry her gently, like a sleeping baby, out of the room.
Mike follows. Nobody else is looking. Everyone has turned their
gaze aside, as if something unfortunate has taken place, and they
are being polite enough not to notice. Some of them are looking
at the television screen, where a coiffed blonde woman is smiling
with all her many teeth and holding up a tube of Colgate
toothpaste.

It was just as if she had been shot with the venomous dart of a
jungle insect, shot and rendered insensible almost before she
knew it. I creep back to my chair. The lounge is very still, preternaturally
still, just like the jungle in the moments after a kill.

I'm almost fond of my room here. From up here on a fine day I
can see endless blue, trackless wastes. My window looks over the
back of the house and beyond the gardens to fields and woods.
The view is prettier than any I've had before. I imagine it's the
kind of view a Carolyn would have from her bedroom window.
The fields are proper green, not bitten brown, and the woods are
real woods – mixed deciduous, as they put it in geography lessons
– with leafy trees in all different shapes and sizes. The hills are
proper hills. In the evenings, out there is where the first star
appears, before the sky has even lost its light. Sometimes, I lean on
the window sill and – ignoring the room behind me which really
doesn't fit the bill – I pretend I am Carolyn, just looking out, just
gazing out on her garden and the countryside that surrounds her
pretty house, and that in a minute or two I will go downstairs to
supper with my lovely family.

I'm not bored here. Not really. I've always been used to waiting
around for things to happen, things that don't usually bother to
happen, anyway, in the end. I wonder if that's what they mean by
low expectations
. I've not had that much history, and mostly I've
been the person drifting round the edges of the picture, looking
on, not the one in the middle, doing whatever it is that the
picture's about. And I've lost the first five years of my life, and
there's a few months recently I've chosen to lose. Perhaps it is
all
entirely voluntary. I think that's what Lorna believes, and that's
why she feels that if I wanted to I could rattle it out like dice from
a shaker. My mother, the children's home, being adopted. The
recent stuff, too. Rattle it out and see what comes up.

I can't imagine how Barbara would survive in here. With her,
boredom is almost a disease, certainly a condition bordering on
the chronic. She'd go stir-crazy by the end of the first day. They
would have to use all those marvellous methods they try to keep
in reserve, syringes and restraints, that kind of thing. What I
witnessed in the patients' lounge. And you see it happening,
sometimes, at the end of a corridor, or through an open bedroom
door. We're always hustled away, hurried past, but I've got a good
idea of what goes on. What goes on with poor deranged creatures
like Rose, or the woman with blonde hair who wrings her hands.
They'd have something up their sleeve for the likes of Barbara.

I would rather not go down to the patients' lounge any more. I
would be quite happy to stay here and just watch the sky for
hours; which, of course, is not approved of. But it's a bloody sight
better than having to mix with loonies.

In a torpid spell of hot weather one July, Barbara and I hatched a
plan. We were what – eleven? Twelve?

I worked it all out in advance. I said to my mother, 'I've been
asked to stay over at a friend's house. To sleep the night. Suzannah
Grey's.'

'Oh yes?' For once she sounded sceptical. 'Where does she live?'

Brian gave me a look, and I looked blandly back. 'Fairwith
Avenue.' I named a road I knew would impress. I'd done my
research.

'What number?'

'Fifteen. It has a white door.'

'A
white
door?'

'A white front door.'

Unfortunately she consulted with my father. This was a new
development, conferring about my welfare. 'Dad will pick you up
tomorrow morning. At nine o'clock. You don't want to
impose
on
people.'

So after tea I took my overnight things in a duffel bag and set
out, walking steadily as far as the roundabout, then taking the
road out of town, past the café, doubling back through the rough
ground beyond the houses and ending up in the pony's field that
adjoined the Hennessys' back garden. Barbara was standing by the
fence, watching Mattie feed the pony and the donkey with carrot
tops.

'What took you so long?'

'Deceiving my elders.'

The plan was to sleep out on the veranda. Barbara said they'd
often done it, when the weather was hot. She was always surprising
me with things like that, things I was no part of, had no
inkling about. I'd be feeling fine and dandy, in the swing of things,
and then – wham! – by the way, here's something you didn't
know, Carol, what fun we had when you weren't here. I could
never make up my mind whether she kept such things from me
deliberately, or whether she just forgot to mention them. God
knows, there's plenty of information that people choose to keep
to themselves. Just think of my family. Think of me.

On the Hennessys' veranda they had an old swing-chair with
faded canvas cushions. I perched on it, my legs dangling, and
watched while Barbara dragged a camp bed and a mattress across
the boards. Down the garden I could see Tom unhooking the
hammock. Tillie had bought it earlier that summer and hung it
between the stoutest pair of apple trees. He carried it towards us
over the lawn and tied it up to two of the veranda posts.

'Where's Tom Rose?' Barbara asked.

Tom shrugged. 'Gone home.'

'Good. We don't want him as well.'

'I'm having the hammock,' Tom said. 'Hands off. Touch it at
your peril.'

I hadn't known that Tom was in the plan. I had thought it was
just Barbara and me. Possibly Isolde, if she felt like it; maybe the
little boys, too, if their mother said yes, and if they didn't drive
Barbara mad with their whispering and noises. But in the end it
turned out to be just Barbara and Tom and me.

Barbara went indoors for supplies, and came back with honey
sandwiches, a KitKat and two hard green apples, which we added
to the chewing gum and cupcakes stolen from the kitchen
cupboard that I had brought. We sat on the boards of the veranda
with our bare legs stretched out, feeling the daytime's heat coming
up out of the wood, and talking in low voices.

The little boys and Tom and Patrick had gone far away down
the lawn, playing some wild game that involved cricket bats and
screaming and not too much else. I thought of my parents,
beyond the hedge. They were probably indoors. My mother disliked
the gnats that hung in clouds in the summer air. Perhaps
they had the wireless on. Perhaps one of them leaned forward and
pointedly turned up the volume, and gave the other a look that
spoke volumes, too.

Then the boards creaked as Tillie walked down the steps and
over the dimming grass, clapping her hands and calling for the
boys to come in. But she must have given up trying, or got sucked
into the game, for we heard her shrieks added to theirs.

'You can sleep on the swing-seat,' Barbara said, which I thought
was very generous of her until I discovered just how hard the
cushions were, sloping at an angle that made you roll towards the
back. She set about making her camp bed into a comfortable nest.
Tillie came back to the house, followed by the little boys. We could
hear their feet going upstairs, doors opening and closing, pipes
thumping, cisterns flushing, dishes and cutlery clashing in the
kitchen as Tillie washed up. The garden was getting darker with a
kind of floating dusk. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted round
to us, and Tillie and her mother's voices talking quietly, in Dutch,
I supposed, because I couldn't understand it. Barbara sat on her
camp bed, pummelling her pillow. 'Something's biting me,' she
complained.

I had so looked forward to this. I had looked forward to the
long luxurious hours of being at their house, of being able to
laugh and to talk – endlessly – what about I didn't know, but I
knew it would end up being about something important.
Countless hours given up to conversation would have to lead to
that. In the past, I'd always had to go back home, long before I
wanted to. I had never stayed overnight with a friend before. I had
never slept outside.

Then Tom came bounding up, shaking the boards of the
veranda. The smell of sweat came off him. The smell of hot flesh,
of rolled-on grass. 'Aha! The trusty hammock,' he said. He
climbed in, fell out, swore, tied it up tighter. He stamped off, came
back with a bottle of water, half of which he drank, then poured
the remaining half noisily over his head. Splashes of it fell on us.

'What have you got, then?' He crouched down, inspecting our
supplies, which Barbara had put into a biscuit tin and pushed
under her camp bed. 'They're ours,' she said. 'Get off them!'

He picked up a cupcake.

'Get your own,' Barbara told him.

He opened his mouth and pushed half of it in, then seeing we
were still watching, he slowly pushed the rest in with a delicate
forefinger. His lips closed over the cake. When he opened them
again on a smile made entirely of crumbs and icing, Barbara
screamed.

I was afraid that this was how it would be. Tom showing off
boys' tricks, bullying us just with the force of his presence, not
allowing us to have those long hours of private conversation. But
then Tillie came out. She walked round the side of the house carefully
on bare feet, carrying a tray of little cakes. 'Oma made these,
for the campers-out.' (Oma was not her Christian name but what
Dutch children called their grandmas, I had found out. I still
avoided her. Too fat, too strange. Too wildly loving.) Tillie set the
tray down carefully on the boards, then crouched down too,
placing her pale square feet side by side, then sat, swinging her
legs down over the edge of the veranda. She picked up a cake and
ate it. Tom calmed down at once, became just another one of us,
reaching a long gorilla's arm out of his hammock to pick up a
cake. And bite into it like a normal person, and chew and swallow.

'Can you smell Grandpa's roses?' Tillie said, and we could,
because she'd suggested it. We tried to identify the flowers we
could smell on the warm evening air, and the sounds of the birds
settling down for the night. If I had been transported to Brazil or
India it could not have seemed further away. I couldn't believe
that my own house was only next door, was just a matter of yards
away, beyond the bulk of the Hennessys' house and the hedge. I
closed my eyes and imagined myself in an Arabian nights' palace,
lying on plump cushions, eating unfamiliar little cakes, breathing
in the exotic scent of roses. Tillie had gone away but came back
again with a glass and her tobacco tin. She set it down beside her
and started to roll one of her thin, uneven cigarettes. 'Get under
your covers now to keep warm,' she said to us. The blanket I had
smelled of the Hennessys' house. I breathed it in as if I was
drowning.

We could hear Isolde's voice high up indoors. I didn't know
who she was talking to, no one could be heard answering back.
Then Patrick appeared across the garden, which was by now all
one uniform grey.

'I'll be off out in a minute,' he said. 'I was going to say was there
anything I could fetch you, but you look well provided for.' And
he nodded at Tillie's drink, her cigarettes, her plate of cakes, her
bare toes pulled up on the edge of the veranda. He put a hand on
Barbara's side, through the blankets, and patted her. 'Sleep well,
my beauty, and mind the bugs don't bite. But I'm sure they will.'
He did the same to Tom, setting the hammock swinging. To me
he said and did nothing, he looked tactfully across me as though
I was nothing but air.

When he had gone Tillie stirred, swilling the ice round in her
glass. She stretched her feet down from the veranda, and jumped
lightly into the grass. 'Oh, well now,' she said. 'Hmm.'

'Mu-um?' said Barbara (who almost never called her that). But
Tillie didn't reply. She just sighed. We watched her walk off into
the dark.

Tom reached out a hand and lifted her glass, draining the last
drops and the slivers of ice. Then he knocked her tobacco tin with
the tips of his fingers, until it had slid into the shadows beneath
Barbara's bed. We lay in the stillness, listening to the quiet. A
sudden cough and snort nearby made Barbara cry, 'God, what's
that!?' but Tom said, sounding sleepy, 'Only that horse over the
fence,' and Barbara sighed, turning in her blankets, and said, 'Oh
yes, the horse.'

I thought we were all going to go to sleep then, though by my
watch – if I stretched my arm out and screwed it round into a
shaft of light coming from inside the house, I could just about see
– it was only half past ten. I was disappointed, I'd thought we
would stay awake till well after midnight, would climb out to look
at the stars. I became aware of how hard my bed was, how sloping,
how prickly the blanket. My eyes strained open. My muscles were
taut and my bones had begun to ache. I tried a yawn to see if I was
at all sleepy – it felt unconvincing. Tom actually let out a snore.
Then Barbara giggled. And sat up. Tom snored some more.
Barbara leaned across and whacked him. The hammock vibrated,
then Tom slowly, slowly, as if in a dream, slumped out of one end
of it and slithered to the floor. He lay absolutely still. Barbara sat,
unmoving. I leaned up on my elbow. Tom still had not moved. A
last bit of his blanket unwound itself from the hammock and we
heard the clunk as his skull dropped an inch or two on to the hard
wood of the floorboards. 'Ow-how!' he said, sounding perfectly
conscious, and we all let out a laugh. I was enchanted.

Tom unravelled himself from his tartan blanket and sat crosslegged
on the veranda, leaning his head back against one of the
wooden uprights. I could see the line of his throat against
the darkness of the garden behind him. His Adam's apple stuck
out. It was a boy's throat, quite different from girls'. 'She's not
coming back,' he said. He reached out a lazy hand and drew
Tillie's tobacco tin towards him. 'Ba?' he said.

'OK. Why not?' said Barbara.

He rolled her a cigarette. His fingers moved confidently,
expertly. I stared in fascination.

'Your friend?' he said, meaning me. Not deigning to know my
name, though I knew he knew it.