Living In Perhaps (17 page)

When I was thirteen my pocket money went up quite a bit. This
was because I was a teenager now. In the past it had risen by three-pence,
then sixpence, every year, which still didn't amount to
much. Suddenly I was a whole two shillings better off. Brian
wasn't pleased, even when it was explained to him that when he
was thirteen the same rule would apply. He continued to moan
every Friday night when the money was doled out, and every
other time it occurred to him. Girls did not deserve to be
preferred above boys, not for any reason – although he wasn't able
to put it like that. And then he suddenly shut up about it. I have a
horrible feeling that someone slipped him something – a lump
sum – to keep him quiet. The old double standard, still alive and
well.

Now that Bettina had stopped visiting every Saturday afternoon,
Brian and I no longer had to stick around to entertain Mandy,
do the family duty. Saturdays became a great stretch of flexible
time, an oasis of freedom between the obligations of school days
and Sundays. Barbara and I took to going into town on a Saturday
to wander round the shops. I actually felt the money burning
a hole in my pocket, a lovely fiscal glow just where the coins sat.
We usually walked all the way into town to save spending precious
money on the bus fare; it took us about half an hour. Sometimes
we went with Barbara's friend Gaynor, who got off the school
bus with her, and sometimes we met up with another friend of
theirs, a fair-haired girl called Jillian. My heart always sank when
I heard that they were coming too, but I didn't have any choice in
the matter.

When it was the four of us, I found that they preferred the
shops that sold stationery and cosmetics. We'd wander round
the counters, picking up erasers and pencil sharpeners and
putting them down again, looking at the wrapping paper and the
cards, trying out lipstick testers on the backs of our hands, spraying
on sample scents. Barbara and Gaynor and Jillian weren't at all
bothered by the penetrating looks of the salesladies in the department
stores, but even so they chose to go to Woolworth's or the
smaller shops, like Dorothy Perkins, where the staff were often
Saturday girls, not much older than us.

One of us might buy a pair of tights, or a hairslide, or some
decorated paper to cover a school textbook, but the rest would
come home empty-handed, except for a few sweets. We always
bought sweets. We became fiends for chocolate bars and caramel,
for Polo mints, for gum. There was always something sweet or
minty in our pockets, in our school bags. We had turned into
Mandy.

In Barbara's bedroom, a dark little room on the ground floor,
she had fixed up a tilting mirror and a desk lamp on top of the
chest of drawers. We directed the lamp on to our faces and peered
into the mirror. I drew my hair back, Barbara piled hers up. We
made gargoyle faces, we simpered like film stars. In the end we
drooped our mouths and came to the conclusion that we would
always be ugly. Barbara kept a few lipsticks, Cover Girl and
Yardley, in the top drawer of the chest. We tried them on –
Sugar
Candy
,
Frosted Plum
,
Café-au-Lait
. One was a dark red. It left a
stain even after I had rubbed my mouth with my hankie. 'God,
why did you buy this one?' I asked.

'Oh, I didn't,' she said, absorbed in smearing pink blusher over
her cheekbones.

'Is it one of Tillie's?' I said, thinking of that time she and Patrick
had gone out all dressed up, the crimson frock and the deep red
lipstick.

'Nah,' said Barbara, pulling a face. 'That's from one of our
shopping expeditions.'

Which seemed like a contradiction to me. She was drawing a
wobbly uptilted tail of eyeliner, the muscles of her forehead tense
with concentration. She saw my expression in the mirror. 'It's
nicked,' she said, and gave me a bored glance so that I didn't dare
overreact. Then she licked the tip of her eyeliner brush and
started on the other eye.

In Woolworth's, with Gaynor and Jillian up ahead, and Barbara
clamping my upper arm, we strolled over to the stationery
counter. Barbara stopped to examine the writing paper, so I
stopped too. I had no choice. Barbara gazed critically at blue
lined, at plain white, at airmail and onion-skin. None of them
seemed up to the purpose she had in mind. The Saturday girl
watched her.

'Do you have any plain cream writing paper?' Barbara enquired.

The girl bent to look beneath the counter. 'I don't think ...'Her
voice was muffled.

Barbara pinched me fiercely. My hand drifted across the
counter top, hung there motionless like someone levitating, in
the control of the spirits. The girl straightened up again. Barbara
pinched me even harder.

'Isn't this it?' I asked, my voice surprising me with its
innocence.

'No, that's lined,' the girl said, lifting up the pad my hand was
wavering over.

'Oh well, thanks anyway,' said Barbara, and shuffled me away.
'Small,' she hissed. 'Something really
small
.'

In Boots the Chemist, we dithered by miniature tubes of sty
ointment, throat pastels, tiny packets of plasters. We sniffed the
cakes of soap. We brushed our fingertips over the jars of lip balm.
My legs had turned to jelly.

It was cold outside and the wind off the sea whipped up the
side streets and flayed our skin. We halted on the street corner,
shivering.

Gaynor, who had tooth braces and a long face that reminded
me of a horse, rounded on me. 'You just can't do it, can you?'

Jillian, tiny and blonde and angelic, the sort of person no adult
would ever seek to pin the blame on, said, 'You look so bloody
guilty you'll get us all in trouble. And we won't have even done
anything!'

Another weekend came round, and I called on Barbara. 'I'm
going out,' she said. I didn't have the nerve to ask her if I could
come too. I just didn't have the nerve.

I went into training. I stiffened my resolve. I practised my skills.

I went round and showed her, pulling out my tiny haul from a
deep coat pocket.

One tester lipstick (only a stub left inside), one pencil eraser,
one set of hair grips still on its card, one corn plaster, one bottle
of clear nail varnish. I didn't say anything.

She studied them. She hugged me. '
I
didn't want to leave you
out,' she said. 'Honestly.'

I looked at her. I didn't know. With her green eyeshadow and
her pearly pink lipstick on, you couldn't tell who she was any
more. And I'd never known what she was really thinking.

As summer came around, it seemed to me that more and more
we left the other two out. Barbara seemed content to stay at home,
with just me for company. We played endless games of tennis over
their sagging net. We swung in the hammock, and used the
embryonic apples and pears that hung in the trees for target
practice. Or we lay in the gloom of Barbara's bedroom and
listened to crackly pirate radio stations and read magazines. The
boredom and torpor seemed half the pleasure.

Barbara and I still went into town together, but not very often.
Occasionally we lifted things, just to keep our hand in, but more
often we didn't bother. It had been just a phase, a phase we'd
largely grown out of. I thought that Gaynor and Jillian had fallen
by the wayside. But then I discovered that Barbara was just as
friendly with them as ever. As thick as thieves, I believe the
expression is.

Jillian had perfected the bag trick. She was eager to show it off.
We went clothes-shopping. We bought things and took them back
for a refund, but saved every receipt, and wandered thoughtfully
round the display rails, pretending to turn up our noses at what
was on offer. We'd amassed a collection of carrier bags from every
shop in town, fresh, new-looking ones, and put them to good use
when the assistants weren't looking. My arms and legs felt weak
again, as if the very bones and sinews had deserted me. Barbara
appeared in a new green skinny-rib top, never paid for. Gaynor
had got a chiffon scarf, and a necklace. But Jillian was the queen:
she had a leather belt, a T-shirt, a short pleated skirt and a top like
Barbara's, only in red.

'Doesn't the thought of getting caught at this ever worry you?'
I asked once, foolishly, when we were walking along the seafront,
eating chips, a carrier bag of stolen goods swinging jauntily from
Jillian's arm. 'Surely the nuns tell you this kind of thing is wrong?'

Gaynor snorted. 'They tell us everything is wrong.
Breathing
is
wrong.'

'Yeah, if you stick out your chest when you do it!' Barbara
added, and they all went into gales of laughter.

'It's a sin, it's a sin,' Jillian said. She was obviously mimicking
someone they all knew. Barbara leaned heavily on my shoulder,
laughing right into my ear.

'It
is
a sin,' I said, and they stared at me and started laughing all
over again.

But nobody did catch us. We were invincible. We carried out
secret raids and escaped with our spoils. Or so I thought at the
time.

I didn't want this kind of stuff. I really didn't want baby lipsticks,
or round ponds of green or lilac powder with a mirror in
the lid, reflecting one evil eye. I didn't want pencil sharpeners set
in frogs' mouths or up pigs' bottoms, or pencils with tiny tassels,
or rainbow-coloured erasers. The smell of those lemon-shaped
soaps made me heave. I didn't want scarves and belts and tights –
I knew if I ever wore them, they'd flash fluorescent signs that
screamed 'Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!' to every passer-by. Especially those
in the retail trade.

I'm sure that Barbara and Gaynor and Jillian didn't really want
them either. I'm sure they could have afforded to buy them, if
that's what they really desired. It was the adventure that was the
thing, the risk, the thrill, the pure distilled wickedness they
wanted. And the one-upmanship: whoever was the latest to steal
something was
best
, whoever's haul was biggest was
boldest
.

This was how I fell out of love with Barbara. When we began
our first forays into the world of petty crime I was desperate for
her approval; by the time we'd finished I no longer cared. I had
other fish to fry. It wasn't girls I was trying to impress now, it was
boys. One boy. Barbara and I were still friends, but we weren't
best
friends. We might have been blood brothers, but we never took
the vow.

'Let's see,' Lorna says, glancing at my file, which today is open on
the table but too far away from me to be readable. I don't even let
my eyes stray in its direction. That would be much too obvious,
and I like to keep Lorna on the hop. Instead I fix my gaze on
Lorna, on her face, and when she looks back up, I gaze deeply and
innocently into her eyes. No one finds it easy to be on the receiving
end of that for very long, surely? Not even someone trained in
the therapeutic arts?

She looks down again and says, 'Your mother wanted you to
take piano lessons. She's musical herself. You say you played duets
together.' She looks up. 'Did you enjoy your music lessons?'

'Yes.'

'Do you still play?'

Given the lack of a milk-white baby grand in the patients'
lounge, what can I say? 'I'd like to,' comes my seraphic answer.

'But the lessons stopped. Can you recall when that was?'

'When I was about thirteen, fourteen.'

'Why was that?'

'They cost too much. We were teenagers. Teenagers are
expensive. They eat a lot and have big feet.'

'I see.'

I realized the conversation we were having was possibly the
smoothest and most pleasant we had ever had. Lorna looked
down again. There was something different about her today. She
was wearing new lipstick,
coral
-coloured. Perhaps she was doing
it for me. My name on her lips.

'Did your mother put an end to the piano lessons when she
found out you'd been shoplifting?' Lorna said, raising her head
sharply, staring at me, shaking her pony fringe out of her eyes. 'As
a punishment? Was that the reason?'

Hang on a minute – which mother are we talking about here?
Perhaps she's trying to trip me up. And my mum didn't find out
about the shoplifting for ages, not until there was a whole lot
more to know as well.

I'm confused. I don't want to drop myself in it. I think I'll plead
the fifth amendment.

It wasn't a crush that I had on Tom. I loved him long and slow,
bad and deep.

Crushes are superficial, juvenile. You learn better, and grow out
of them. If I had a crush on anyone, it was Isolde. I was daunted
but impressed by her; wanted to look like her, to
be
her. She
seemed so unbelievably adult, so composed, even when I first
knew her. She had Patrick's hair, horse-brown and curly. She wore
it long, often in a ponytail but sometimes gathered romantically
up, like a girl on a Greek vase. Her pale, high-cheekboned face,
with eyes that were just horizontal lines, narrowed and discriminating,
was the pattern of beauty, to me. She persuaded me
that she was truly special. But every time she glanced disdainfully
round at her family, and sighed and said that the fairies must have
swapped her at birth, I thought: how can you say that? How can
you wish yourself out of a family like this?

That's how it was with Isolde. But not with Tom.

At first I hardly noticed him, he was just a
big boy
, lanky and
harsh-voiced. Then, when I had sorted the Hennessys out from
each other, and knew their names, he was the one I avoided. If
there was one thing in the world I wasn't accustomed to it was
big
boys
. I knew about
little
boys. And whiny little girls, and older
girls, really – aunts and cousins and mothers all amounted to that,
extensions of the female at all ages and stages. But big boys were
strange and scary. Tom would swing round the corner of the hallway
like a gorilla, one hand on the banisters, and lunge up the
stairs, two or three at a time. Spurts of energy would propel him
forward, or up, or down. Expulsions of laughter burst from his
lungs. He and Tom Rose conversed with one another by shouting,
like people coughing up blood – great gobbets and gouts of noise
issued out of them, all of a sudden, stopping and starting again,
racking their bodies as they ran and leaped about the house. I
didn't know how Tillie could bear it.

Nobody else in the house seemed to notice the horror of
this.

But then, I suppose, they'd been through Eugene.

Eugene I never saw. Eugene was a figment of Hennessy
imagination, a monkey baby in a painting, old enough now to
make his own way in the world. Barbara said he was learning to
be an architect. He lived somewhere called Parsons Green (I
imagined an olde English village) with some people called Dill
and Arthur. Arthur had been Patrick's best man at the wedding.
Dill was his second wife, his first wife, Eloise, having run off with
a boy of nineteen. Two thoughts crossed my mind: one – wasn't
Arthur worried about the possibility that his second wife might
run off with another boy of nineteen (or thereabouts, I didn't
quite know Eugene's age)? And two – that I had absolutely no idea
who was best man to
my
father, if he had one. How was it right
that I should know more about the Hennessys than my own
family?

Barbara taught me a little rhyme. She would hop on and off the
back steps, reciting it:

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living.
But the child that is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

'What day were you born on?' she asked me. I looked blank. It
had never occurred to me that I must have been born on a
particular day of the week. '
I
was born on a Thursday,' she said
happily. 'That means either I'll travel a lot, or have great achievements.
Or both, probably. Izzy's Tuesday, Tom's Friday, Eugene
and Mattie are both Mondays, and Sebastian is a Sunday's child.'

I thought about that. It seemed fair enough to me.

'What day was I born on?' I asked my mother, who gave me a
blank look the equal of my own. 'What day of the week?' After
a bit, she said, 'Wednesday.' Only later did I know that she must
have been lying. Guessing.

Guessing, lying, making it up: what's the diff ? We do it all the
time.

So, Tom.

I can't really say what it was I loved about him. I can't go: let me
count the ways. I always knew about his defects, and God knows
he had enough. That's why it wasn't a crush or calf-love or any of
those moony spoony patronizing names for adolescent heart-pangs.
My love for him was always clear-eyed.

First he was an alien, a noisy gorilla, it was only his curly fair
hair that I found fascinating and attractive. Then, just as Barbara
and I were growing apart, I realized that he'd become the fixed
centre of that turning household on which my eye was always
focused. I could look at his sticking-out Adam's apple, at his big
clumsy feet, or the way his T-shirt hung off his shoulder blades,
and not delude myself that these things were beautiful, but know
I loved them. I dwelt on them with affection. He always was
bullying and egotistical and full of some enormous chip-on-the-shoulder
rage to which I'm sure he wasn't entitled. But I didn't
mind. I loved him. The fact that I could bear these things made
me feel proud.

Then, at times, he
could
be loving, could be suddenly, strikingly
gentle – with an insect, or one of his brothers, or me – in a way
that made my heart stop. And he was always candid, and amusing,
and inhabited his body, his long bony body, like an animal,
perfectly at home with itself and with the physical world. He
could happily lie down to watch television on double beds beside
(almost) complete strangers. He could fall asleep at the table in
the middle of a noisy kitchen. He could climb up the posts of the
veranda and swing in feet-first through his bedroom window, and
if you asked why, he might say, 'I didn't feel like taking the
stairs.'

Of course all this was attractive to a girl of limited experience,
limited physical experience (the physical means at my disposal
being one ever-tidy bungalow, one bolted bathroom door, one
family sure as eggs is eggs that God gave us our bodies in order for
us to walk to church, and to cover them decently, and never use
them to draw attention to ourselves). Of course Tom's physical
presence was highly seductive. I succumbed. Of course I did. As
sure as eggs is eggs.

Tom's friend Tom Rose was always about. Even more than
me he inhabited the house like one of its rightful occupants.
He ate meals with them, which I did not – or almost never – and
he often stayed the night on Tom's bedroom floor. We always
had to call him Tom Rose to differentiate; never Tom
Hennessy
and Tom Rose, just Tom and Tom Rose. He was tall, too, but
wide-shouldered, with a nose about to become a beak; mean-eyed
and unlovely, to my way of thinking. He was an appendage of
Tom's, a shadow, a sniggering partner, a recipient of sideways
looks, digs in the ribs. 'He lives with his mother, his dad died at
sea,' Barbara had told me once. 'And he doesn't get on with his
mum's new boyfriend.' (I wondered what she told anyone
about me, in those sharp, potted histories she always had
available, like the
Dictionary of National Biography
.) And why
did this make Tom Rose ever welcome, and why did it make
him not suburban? Almost the first I knew of liking Tom was
knowing that I didn't like Tom Rose. In fact, I was horribly
jealous of him.

We were in Tom's bedroom. We always seemed to be in his
bedroom these days. As adolescents we needed the music, we
needed the ambience of posters and joss sticks and old socks, and
beds and floor cushions to lie on, rather than armchairs and other
proper upright furniture. Isolde hated it, she glanced in at the
doorway and then turned on her heel and walked away, her high
heels tapping, just like someone already grown-up, busily pacing
the corridors of their place of work. And Barbara was too
impatient for quite so much indolence, got rapidly bored with
languid sounds and smells, would jump up, chuck a balled sock
or a paper dart at Tom, and depart. She didn't get on with Tom at
all these days, and she had never liked Tom Rose. Which left just
me and the two of them, perusing the latest music papers and
album covers, and staring into space.

Tom leaned over and said to me, as if he'd just noticed my
presence: '
Where
is it that you live?'

'Down the road.'

'Where exactly? Which house?'

'Next door,' I said, faintly.

'Next door? At
Mister Clipper's
?' And he made a gesture to go
with it, an imitation of someone using hedge clippers, just like my
father. 'Then you must be Caroline Clipper. Caroline Clipper!'
And he laughed and laughed, rolling back on to the bed and
hugging his ribs. He made more noise than he strictly needed to.
'She's Caroline Clipper!' he shouted to Tom Rose. Tom Rose was
sitting on the floor cross-legged, idly rolling the poker dice. He
laughed too, but only quietly.

'I'm not really
his
,' I said. 'I told you. I was
adopted
.'

'Oh yes,' said Tom, and his eyes locked with Tom Rose's for a
second, and I knew they knew I was making it up.

'I wouldn't live there if it was up to me. But what can I do about
it till I'm older?'

'Run away?' offered Tom Rose.

'As if I could!'

'Run away with
me
,' laughed Tom.

'Come here. Yes,
you
.'

When Tom kissed, it was with his jaw and teeth. This was a disappointment
to me. I'd thought kissing must be like melting.
That's what it looked like on TV. Instead it was a kind of grinding
of hard surfaces. Something you'd really have to work at developing
a liking for, like beer. The next thing, a split second after the
gum-grinding began, was the shocking entry of his tongue into
my mouth. It was very invasive, into somewhere as private as
one's own mouth. Meeting lips was a meeting of equals; having
Tom's tongue wiggling into my mouth was quite different. It was
hot and lively, like some terrible pet that is put into your hands for
a moment and gets instantly out of control, hurrying up your
sleeves or down your neck, exploring, inquisitive. I must have
reared my head away from him, because I felt his hand on the base
of my skull, pressing me back down on to his tongue. God, if this
is kissing, I thought, I had better go to Barbara's school and give
myself up as a nun.

I have to say that, technically, Tom Rose had the advantage. I
didn't like him at all, and kissed him under duress, but with him
kissing was how I expected, a soft melting, a much more
comfortable experience all round. He seemed to have lips where
Tom had hard jaws, and he used them to cushion the place
where we met, and his tongue only came out slowly and thoughtfully,
a bit like a snail from its shell. His tongue sought my tongue,
not my fillings. He seemed to solve the problem of the noses
instinctively, as if there wasn't any problem there at all. If only he
could have passed his technique on to Tom.

In Tom's bright, bare, dusty room, we sat on the floor, pressing
jaw to jaw. I was aware of other sounds elsewhere in the house:
Patrick calling out joyously, 'Now isn't that always the way?', and a
door slamming in the breeze from other open doors, and Mattie
droning below in the front garden, and someone running lightly
down the long staircase, tapping something hard and rattling on
the banisters all the way down. I was conscious of the dustballs
on the floor, and the smell of socks, and the droop of the red
tartan blanket, frayed at the edge, as it hung off the side of
the bed.

'Now me,' Tom would say, and a bit later, 'Now Tom.'

Did Tom Rose want this? Did Tom Rose have the same
antipathy for me as I had for him? But then, as I had learned from
the nuns, via Barbara, boys were only after
one thing
. They would
use every opportunity that befell them to achieve that
one thing
,
even with girls they had no other use for. Particularly with girls
they had no other use for.

But perhaps in Tom's hands we were both powerless – experimental
animals, laboratory mice – doing and being done unto as
required, clinical and detached. For the purposes of the experiment,
I was quite willing. At least, I was not entirely unwilling.

'I've got a boyfriend,' Hanny told me, 'on the outside. I don't
much like him. My mother set him up for me.'

'Your
mother
?'

'My mother the matchmaker.'

'What, she wants you to
marry
him?'

'No. She just wants me not to be a social pariah.'

I glanced at Hanny. She was giving me her sideways look. Her
ironical look. I smiled. She was joking. Maybe none of what she'd
said was true.

'His name's David. A
nice
boy. In my mother's words.'

There was a little silence, while we watched some faded brown
and pink blossom bowl along the pathway in the wind just like the
merry hoop of an Edwardian child in carefree days of yore. If ever
there were any carefree days of yore. If Edwardian children were
not just as sunk as us under the weight of their tweeds and their
boots and parental expectations and parental neglect.

'Have you got a boyfriend?' Hanny said. 'I shouldn't ask. I hate
to ask, really. That's the kind of thing my mother thinks passes for
unaffected social chit-chat. That, and enquiring of newly married
women if they're pregnant yet.'

'No,' I said, because it was true. A little truth. I had imparted to
Hanny a little tiny truth.