Living In Perhaps (20 page)

It's my birthday today. My nineteenth birthday. Gemini. The
Twins. I can just picture the sign for Gemini, from one of
Barbara's magazines: two identical figures sitting, knees up, back
to back. Looking out in opposite directions. Not speaking to each
other.

My birthday passes as spectacularly as every other birthday.
Nobody sends me a card.

In Activity I made a birthday cake out of my clay and rolled a
birthday candle and stuck it on the top.

'What's that?' Hanny said to me, and I said, 'A penguin,' and she
said, 'It's not very good.'

Patrick and Tillie were having a party. A big party to celebrate
their wedding anniversary, and her fortieth birthday, the dates of
which were close together.

We didn't celebrate birthdays much in our house. Maybe it was
the adoption thing, I concluded later. Maybe our dates of birth,
birth to some unknown woman, somewhere in the world, were
not important, were ludicrous to celebrate in that family. At the
time I only thought that birthdays were low-key, having little
experience of anyone else's. A card or two, a single present,
wrapped, beside the breakfast plate, mumbled good wishes in the
morning and then get on with the rest of the day as if it were any
other. No cakes, no candles, no parties, no balloons.

So Tillie was forty. I was surprised. She didn't look it. She
looked girlish, and like the Tillie of twenty in the paintings of her.
Though now I thought about it, the skin around her eyes was dry
and papery, a faint dove-grey. There were fine lines etched all over
the backs of her hands as if, when she drew them from the
washing-up water and dried them, the elastic sheen of youth was
gone. She moved like a girl, and squinted and stuffed the hair
behind her ears like a girl, but maybe she wasn't quite so youthful
after all. How could I compare?

Stella was thirty-nine. I knew because Mandy had told me.
Mandy was good for this kind of information. Bettina was thirty-one
and Stella thirty-nine. My father was six years older, making
him forty-five, and Gloria was somewhere in between. And who
knows how old my mother was? This was a secret she felt it only
dignified to keep, like keeping the size of her bust from prurient
shop assistants. If Stella was thirty-nine and Tillie forty, which
one looked the younger? It was hard to tell if Stella looked older
or just like a member of a completely different species. Her
powdered cheeks were rough peach-skin, her pierced earlobes
creased down the middle, her bosom had a deep declivity Tillie
could never hope to achieve. Yet Tillie had six children and Stella
none. Perhaps it was true what Gloria sometimes claimed
(though not on her own behalf, of course): children are supposed
to keep you young.

'They're having a party? I'm staying over that night with a
friend,' Barbara announced.

'How do you know it's that night?' asked Isolde.

'Because I'm just about to get myself invited,' Barbara called
back, tearing down the stairs towards the telephone.

'If they're having a party, I'm staying here,' Isolde said darkly.
'To keep an eye on things.'

'Good,' said Tom. 'A party. Good.'

I knew, in the part of my soul that was Caroline Clipper, that a
party was bad news. My mum and dad would peer out of the
windows at cars coming down the street, and express their dismay
at the number. They would tune their ears to any hint of noise,
and worry and fret all evening, speculating on the exact nature of
the event next door. There would be drinking, there would be
revelry. It was summer and people would be bound to drift outside,
windows would be thrown open. I didn't know anything
about parties.

'What are you going to
wear
?' Tillie asked me, all excited.

'Am I invited?' I asked.

'Of
course
you're invited.'

In the event we hid upstairs.

Isolde, in a purple satin shift dress with a V-neck and a neatly
darted waist, made it her job to wander round offering big
plates of food. Tillie and her mother had made canapés, tiny
mouthfuls of things, strange and mouth-watering and delicious. I
was afraid to count how many foodstuffs I could not identify.
Isolde drifted about, elegant and at ease. I could hear her voice:
sing-song, chit-chat. It reminded me of the time I'd overheard
Barbara talking with our piano teacher. Where did they learn this
social competence? (Actually, I knew. It came in the package, it
came with the deal: in the genes and as part of the upbringing.
Nature
and
nurture. Wouldn't you bloody know it?) Mattie and
Sebastian circulated, spoilt and feted – or studiously avoided,
according to inclination – by the guests, until they fell asleep in
corners and were carried out of the way.

The nerve centre of the party was the kitchen, where most of
the guests seemed to gather. It was from here, in the big double
oven, that the baking trays of delicacies emerged. More, and
different kinds, appeared from the old head-high fridge. Mrs Van
Hoog swam back and forth through the crowd, taking a slow
crawl to the sink for clean glasses, pushing with an onerous
breaststroke back to the oven with yet another empty platter. The
crowds parted only with greatest reluctance, hauling in the small
of their backs, tucking their elbows away to give her an inch or
two, glancing over their shoulders at her as if she was the hired
help. Maybe they believed she was. She had on her sky-blue
pinafore, and the hair pinned into her bun was escaping in sweaty
curls. She kept her mouth firmly shut. Her expression was
inscrutable. If she had been the hired help I would have guessed
her politics were fiercely left-wing and she despised these lightweight
revellers but did the work anyway and spent her wages on
dynamite for others to blow them up. But she was Tillie's mother,
the famously soft and spoiling Oma, endlessly prising open the
children's mouths to tuck sweet cakes inside. She would do anything
for Tillie. She would feed the five thousand, and wash the
food down with drink until it swilled out of their gills again.

And there was enough drink for the five thousand. I had never
seen so much all in one place, not even in an off-licence (and the
only time I went in one of those was to buy a bag of crisps). It
stood on all the surfaces, together with glasses tall and short,
delicate or free-with-petrol tough. There were bottles of wine,
and bottles of spirits in more shapes than I knew bottles came in,
and brown beer bottles, and fat beer cans, and Patrick already had
a barrel wedged outside on the veranda where people could just
come and turn the beer on like a tap. And Tillie, or her mother,
had made a drink called a wine cup, in a huge glass bowl
swimming with slices of orange and apple and waterlogged
brown banana, and even with petals from garden flowers. I was
surprised anyone wanted to drink it, but it was going down fast,
and every so often Patrick would seize the nearest bottle and pour
generous quantities in.

So this was how you held a party.

I took myself to the kitchen, imagining I could be like Isolde
and justify my presence by helping out. But Tillie found me
nothing to do, kept whirling past me as if I was invisible. I picked
up a plate and she whisked it out of my hands, and then turned,
got grabbed and kissed on the cheek by someone, fell into
animated conversation, and quite forgot about the plate. I was
squeezed between the edge of the kitchen table and the bodies of
yelling strangers who kept backing into me and stepping on my
feet without even noticing. I knew no one, could talk to no one,
had nothing to eat and no glass in my hand. I was a party failure.

Tom's chin came over my shoulder and rested there, painfully.
'Come on,' he said, 'this is no place for the likes of us.' His arms
came round my ribs and he joined his hands together at the front.
He stood up straight again, removing his chin, but kept his hands
where they were. 'Too many arty farts. Too many
Oooh hallooo,
how nice to see yooo
-s.' It made me laugh: this was just what Tillie's
grabber had said. Tom backed me out through the door, along the
hall, and then posted me ahead of him up the stairs. I was sad to
lose his hold on me. His lanky arms around my ribs were more
intimate than any of those kisses had been.

Tom and Tom Rose and I sat upstairs on the floor of Tom's
room. We could feel the music vibrating through the floorboards
under our thighs, thrumming up our backbones, buzzing in our
skulls. The dog, which had been confined to Tom's room to keep
him out of the way, sat tensely beside us. Even he looked headachy
and confused.

Tom had brought up a plate of food and a big can of bitter. Tom
Rose made two holes in it with the can opener that was a fixture
of Tom's bedside table, and attempted to drink straight from the
can. 'Oh,
waste
!' Tom shouted, as it slid down his chin, neck and
shirt. He found three glasses, misty, and probably used many
times without benefit of a wash, in the detritus on top of his chest
of drawers. He poured, also missing. The huge can was hard to
manoeuvre. 'Oh,
waste
!' Tom Rose said, in his deeper voice, enjoying
himself. 'No matter,' said Tom. 'Lots more where that came
from.'

'Certainly is,' Tom Rose said, sitting back against the side of the
bed, belching, deeply satisfied.

We heard the cackling laughter of people below on the front
veranda, the shouted greetings when another car drew up.
'Nowhere to bloody park!' I heard a man call. 'Haven't you roped
off a neighbouring field, Hennessy?' His voice assumed a honking,
barking edge. 'I say, haven't you roped off one of your fields?
The old hundred-acre would do.' I thought of my mother and
father, twitching at the net curtains, horrified. I was horrified too.

The beer was warm and tasted of electroplated spoons. I drank
it down like water. The more of it you had, the less you tended to
react with a shudder.

Tom had turned his own record player on, was competing with
some deeply thrumming music, jangling electric guitars and a
synthesizer that seemed to be playing some other song entirely.
The words sounded like 'Wait, wait, wait, why do-on't you-ou
wait?' I didn't share his taste in music, I didn't seem to have any
taste in music of my own yet, so I just tipped back my head and
mouthed along as if I knew the words: 'Wait, wait, wait ...'

'Why-hy do-on't you-ou
wait
!?' Tom and Tom Rose wailed,
screwing up their faces, leaning their heads towards one another.

When that side of the record had finished Tom Rose turned it
over and Tom scrambled up and loped off downstairs for more
drink. While he was gone Tom Rose made no attempt to talk to
me or even look at me. He could have been alone in the room.
His foot thumped up and down on the floor in time to the
music. Tom was some time. He came back with four bottles of
beer and a clear glass bottle half full of gin.

I tried the gin, an inch in the bottom of my beer glass. That
really made me shudder and gag. It looked so innocuous, watery,
sliding around like glycerine. Tom took my glass and went to the
window, tipping it over the veranda roof below. 'It's raining gin,'
he called down. 'Just look up and stick your tongues out!'

I didn't bother to drink any more. I went to the bathroom and
swilled my mouth with tap water and a dab of toothpaste. I had
to queue behind three other people before I could get in.

When I came back, Tom Rose was looking at his watch. 'I have
to go soon,' he said. I had to go too, but I always felt an idiot for
saying so. In fact I should have gone long before, but that was too
foolish to admit to.

Where did my parents think I was? At my friend's, up the road.
I was hazy as to exactly which friend, which house. I let them fall
into believing it was the new girl, the plump girl with the long
single plait down her back, who had moved into the bungalow
nearest the roundabout. She went to my school – at least, we saw
her in the uniform – and she was about my height. I didn't even
know her name, though I had christened her Rosemary and kept
it in store, just in case they should ask. I gave the impression we
did our homework together, that is, I went off with books under
my arm, without actually putting the notion into words. You
couldn't even say that I had actually lied this time ... my friend,
down the road ... well, here I was. It just wasn't that inert-looking
girl with the pink-framed spectacles. It was Tom, lanky and
lecherous. And Tom Rose, the inner parts of whose mouth I knew
well, though he wouldn't even speak to me.

'But it's just getting good,' said Tom. 'Look, look, something
special.' And he got out a tobacco tin, just like his mother's, with
a scratched, intricate pattern of leaves on top, and opened it.
Inside, amongst shreds of tobacco, was a long twisted white paper
cigarette, very inexpert-looking. It reminded me more of a
Tampax than one of Tillie's little roll-ups, which were match-sized
and match-thin.

'Now, this ...' Tom said, stretching out comfortably on the
floor, 'is
our
party.'

We passed it from mouth to mouth. It was no good my saying
I didn't smoke. Hadn't smoked at all, really, not since the hot
worm in my throat on the veranda years before. At school girls
smoked Number Six with a Polo mint in their mouths, the cheap
version of menthol cigarettes. I usually accepted the Polo mint
and didn't bother with the rest.

'Be a good girl,' Tom said, confidentially, winking like some old
uncle. 'Don't be a drag.'

'Well,
do
be a drag,' said Tom Rose, laughing lazily, issuing a
white layer of smoke out of his mouth, like some mountain mist,
heavy and rolling, 'do
take
a drag.'

The beer, the gin, the toothpaste, the unfamiliar food, were
curling around in my stomach like some restless animal trying to
settle itself. The smoke flowed in and around, the smell of it was
inside the channels of my head and around me, outside. I gritted
my teeth, determined to hold on to my integrity, my stomach
contents. I got up slowly, a bit unsteady. 'I've really got to go. I'm
dead late.'