Repeat It Today With Tears (3 page)

‘I’ll give you another scrip for penicillin. Make sure you take it all, and try to drink or gargle, there’s a lot of debris there.’ He accented the word in the French way; on his desk there was a perpetual calendar of brass which extended to a new millennium. The doctor was stern, he reminded me of some minor character from a wartime film. I did not dare to ask him about dying but I was comforted to sense that he was kind towards me.

When the tonsils are severely inflamed, it is impossible to swallow anything, even saliva is too painful. Because, so often, I could not eat, I began to grow thinner. I missed almost a whole school year. When, after a long bout of illness I returned to repeat the fourth form, the games mistress said she hoped she could expect to see me run much faster in the netball court from now on.

We were streamed into sets for different lessons. My Latin teacher said that she had never had a student like me, in English one of my essays was taken away for a competition. I made friends with a bony blonde girl named Alison. Alison was never still, she was constantly restless and animated by a nervy energy. She was so thin that her legs were merely the shape of her bones and yet she took six spoons of sugar in her tea and brought brown paper bags of doorstep sandwiches to eat on her two bus journeys to school.

One morning break when we were sitting on the lost property box reading an Avon catalogue the Latin teacher sought me out, ‘Literae Humaniores,’ she said.

Alison and I regarded her blankly. ‘We have just had confirmation,
we put your name forward for the scholarship exam and sent in some of your work. Oxford have agreed to let you sit the paper, even though it will be two years early.’

I was not sure what she was talking about but because her habitual earnestness was lit by pleasure I said thank you.

‘We’ll write home,’ she said. ‘I’ll organise it straight away, with the school secretary.’

‘That must be good then,’ said Alison.

I said that I supposed so and we resumed our perusal of the catalogue pages.

Alison lived on a council estate behind the Battersea Dogs’ Home at Nine Elms. She was savvy and quick-witted; when she was ten her mother had unexpectedly produced two other children in rapid succession and Alison became self reliant, playing out on the balconies and walkways and concrete aprons of the estate and in the surrounding streets where there was already demolition for the coming of the New Covent Garden. I had never played in the street before, we had great fun together. Looking back, it was an odd mixture of the childish and the prepubescent. With enthusiasm we joined in the nuisance games like knocking down Ginger that the estate children played. We sat swinging our legs on low walls by chalked pavements, eating the sweets from Jamboree bags and brightly coloured penny chews. At the same time we were often deep in contemplation of the states of love and sexual attraction that we heard enunciated in soul music, or scathing in our disparagement of the lives and tasks of the women in the flats that surrounded us. It seemed that women, once they were settled in a marriage, existed in a world where things spilled out and spilled over. Their hard-skinned soles overlapped the edge of their mule sandals, hair escaped from under scarves, slack stomachs and breasts overflowed garments, groceries spilled from carrier bags, children fought
to wriggle free from a pram harness or a hand’s grasp, always there were messes spilled and dirt trodden that must be mopped and wiped. Women leant on their balconies and watched other people moving, without aspiration. They were slack, perhaps because their lives had lost the tight excitement and expectant promise it once and briefly had.

For all her daylight freedom, Alison’s parents were particularly strict about her fulfilling the household chores that she was set and about her coming home time in the evening; at eight o’clock she must enter the lift for the seventh floor of the tower block and the darkening balcony from which you could glimpse the river and the illumined sign of Dolphin Square. Her father would stand waiting on the seventh landing for the lift to ascend. My mother imposed no such restrictions on me; if it was not a night when Ron was expected she would go to bed early with a red rubber hot water bottle and a book of crossword puzzles. When Alison invited me to stay on Friday nights my mother made no demur; not so long afterwards I was able to exploit her disinterested attitude in full measure.

On Saturday mornings Alison was tasked with taking the family’s laundry to the Nine Elms wash baths, transporting the capacious plastic launderette bags in her brother’s pram. Sometimes the lifts were out of order and between us we would bump the pram down the many flights of new brutalism concrete. On the landings the corners smelled of urine and were strewn with the charred match boxes from children making flaming missiles.

The architecture of the Nine Elms wash baths burgeoned with the improving impetus of Victorian civic philanthropy. The terracotta brickwork was embellished with garlands and urns and classical masks. Inside there were majolica wall tiles and mosaic floors, polished brass fittings and teak benches. Alison
said that in one section you bought a bathe with a towel and soap hired, but only old men and funny men went there now, she thought. ‘My mum always says to keep well out of it.’

The laundry section of the wash baths was the preserve of female company. The superintendent was a small bird-eyed woman; her hair was dyed ink-black and worn in a 1940s style snood at the base of her neck.

‘Morning, girls, come to do Mum’s wash, have we?’

Two other women sat on the wooden benches. In the disposition of their wearied limbs and the large ungainly bulk of their mainly fawn clothing and their dull eyes they resembled old soldiers, resting after a campaign. One of them had leg bandages which could have been puttees.

‘That’s right.’ Alison was intent upon inspecting the change her mother had given her, calculating whether by doubling up the load at the driers stage she could save enough money to buy herself a packet of ten cigarettes on the way home. Alison favoured the menthol kind but if she could not afford a whole packet we visited the newsagent who sold threepenny singles and assured us, each time, that it was better to be born lucky than born rich.

I helped her to load the wash into one of the big blue machines that had been screwed to the mosaic floor.

‘How’s your boy then, Doreen?’ one of the old soldier women asked the superintendent.

‘My son? Don’t ask. I was in the Cricketers last night and she came in, with her husband. No shame.’

She looked to Alison: ‘You know my boy Danny, don’t you?’

‘Not me, no.’ Alison turned away, drumming her bony fingers on the metal lid of the machine. I knew that she did know Danny, we both did; we talked to him sometimes while he was out mending his motor scooter.

‘He’s with the Electric Board, doing his City and Guilds, you must have seen him around. Now he’s got himself hitched up with an older woman.’ The superintendent turned towards me and I felt surprise that she deemed me old or informed enough to be included in the conversation. ‘Dreadful it is, shocking.’

After each sentence she patted the crimson mouth corners of her lipstick with a fingertip; the nylon fabric of her overall whispered as she moved her arms.

‘And married too, is she, Doreen?’ The other bench woman put in, the glint in her eyes showing that she was keen to stir up the indignation further.

‘Too right she is, I just told you, he was there last night, the husband. She can’t get enough, the bitch. She’s a ruddy nympho. Pardon me, girls.’

‘I don’t suppose you’re telling these anything they don’t already know, not nowadays.’

Alison was watching for the powder light on the machine to come on. Under her breath she said, ‘Let’s hope to God we never turn into one of them when we’re old. You’d shoot yourself first, wouldn’t you?’

‘That’s true, they know it all these days, don’t you, girls. Have your cake and eat it. And you don’t ever have to get caught either, not now, when you can take a pill to stop it.’

‘That’s right. Buy me and stop one,’ said Alison.

‘Hark at you. Come here and take the end of this sheet for me.’

Alison and the superintendent stood pulling and folding sheets, walking towards each other with the ends when the requisite size was reached. I had tried it one week but had lost hold when Doreen had stretched and twitched the cloth and so I was not asked again. Alison was expert, knowing instinctively the choreography of the task and holding fast to the corners when
they were tugged.

‘So, girls, you got boyfriends?’

I shook my head. Alison said, ‘Might have.’

‘I thought you would. It’s because you’re a blonde, men can never resist a blonde. What’s he like?’

‘All right, I suppose.’

‘I hope you don’t let him.’

One of the bench women raised her head as if from reverie, ‘They’ll never respect you if you do.’

The superintendent turned to me, ‘Ah, look at her there, all wide-eyed. You’re too quiet and shy for all this, aren’t you, love?’

‘She’s all right,’ Alison said.

‘Here it comes,’ the bench women were nodding at a younger woman who was entering, pulling her wash behind her in a basket on wheels. Her heels tapped on the mosaic and her newly dressed hair was swept back and lacquered into curls. She eyed the seated women critically for a moment and then said to one, ‘Blimey, close your legs, girl, your meat’s smelling.’

The other woman guffawed and the superintendent clicked her tongue in disapproval.

Alison said, ‘They’re such dirty old bags in here, they make me sick. Come on, let’s go and tap the phone instead while the wash is doing.’

By these words Alison did not mean to suggest that we listened in to the conversations of others – although we always welcomed a crossed line – rather, it was a method she had acquired of literally tapping up and down the cradle of old black composition telephones in a sequence corresponding to number, in most cases it would effect a connection. Alison would scan the directories in the hope of finding a famous name. She had also perfected a method to reach the GPO recruitment line with its
own recorded song which began ‘Hey, hey, hey telephone girl’. She would sing back to the jingle, gyrating and dancing in the small space of the telephone box.

‘Go on, find us a number from the books.’ While she began to clack at the receiver rest I opened a directory. ‘See if you can find us a teacher’s number, we’ll give them a heavy breather. Try the Latin teacher’s, go on, in the A–D’.

I ran my finger down the columns for the Latin teacher and, in so doing, I found the listing for my father’s name. Crowded into the telephone box on the bright Battersea pavement, where the ornate bricks of the baths threw back the warmth of the sun, I smiled in recognition at the entry on the printed page. I wondered why I had not thought to look before. His address was 33 Oakley Street, SW3.

‘Well, get a move on, have you found it?’

‘Not her. She’s not in here. I’ll try someone else.’

In the afternoon we went to Clapham Junction and roamed the departments of Arding and Hobbs until the millinery assistants told us to leave. Coming out of the side door onto Lavender Hill we saw that a crowd had gathered outside the record store named the Slipped Disc.

‘Let’s have a butchers,’ Alison said, propelling us through the traffic. The singer Desmond Dekker was signing copies of his newly released record. We had no money to buy one but a member of the entourage handed us each a copy. Looking at me, he said, ‘Free – if you give me your phone number.’ I thought he must be speaking to someone else. I looked about me.

‘He meant you, thickhead,’ said Alison as we walked away, ‘God, you’re so slow sometimes. You were well in there. He really fancied you.’

I was dumbfounded. I saw the world from within the outline that people like my grandmother and the games mistresses had
drawn around me. They had told me that I was fat and ungainly and unlovely, and therefore, I assumed, I was unlovable. It had not occurred to me that I might ever be found attractive. When I looked in a mirror I always stood to one side so that only half of me was reflected.

‘Strewth, wake up, girl, do,’ said Alison and I felt a lip edge of confident pleasure begin to curl. She was speaking through chunks of nougat, biting off a solid bar, ‘And talking of doing it and all, I might as well tell you, I’ve got a boyfriend now, Beccles. And I’m not really a virgin anymore.’

Stewart Beccles was the tall, serious Jamaican boy from her estate. I was astonished by the nonchalance with which she imparted this admission. Further, I saw that I would have expected my friend to have been somehow changed by such an event, yet she was not.

‘Where did you do it, and when, when did you do it?’

‘On the stairs. Last Tuesday. It’s all right as it goes, you should try it.’

Without delay I began to test the theory that Alison, and by inference, the man from the record company had advanced, gauging in the eyes of men that passed me in the street and in cars, their response to the way that I looked. When I saw how they reacted to me it was headier than any alcohol. I stopped covering myself up with layers of cardigans and coats.

Two days later the council announced that due to the coming of the New Covent Garden market, Alison’s family were to be rehoused to an estate on the site of the old Croydon Airfield. Her mother was delighted, she said that it would be healthier, with green spaces and a residents’ club. I cried over Alison leaving and she cried over Beccles.

My consolation lay in the list at the back of the exercise book. I had written down my father’s address. Now that I could be sure that men liked looking at me I wanted him to see me as well.

Ron was surprised when I offered to brush out his car, ‘What’s this, Bob a Job Week?’

As I walked down the hall with the brush and pan I heard him say to my mother: ‘She’s really bucked up since she lost all that weight. She’ll give her sister a run for her money, looks wise.’

I had offered to sweep out the car because I knew that Ron kept an A–Z in the door compartment. Although I was charged with excitement I set myself first to sweep steadily at the carpet where he flicked his cigarette ash, just in case the two of them were watching me. When it was done I opened out the A–Z on the floor of the car; I found the index and then the page and the location in relation to Albert Bridge. With a surge of happiness for the neatly labelled roads I saw how straightforward it would all be.