Wise Children (3 page)

In the face of this, a book whose celebration of the life-force is so very forceful, whose countless births and birthdays and rebirths from the dead crescendo in its great fertile explosion of an ending, is a designed kindness.
Wise Children
is, from start to finish, a performance – an act. And what an act. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of suspension of disbelief – in other words, an act which invites belief. It’s an act of survival. It’s an act of voice against silence. It’s an act of communality – and the proof that a role like mother, father, even self, can be taken by more than one person, in other words, can be shared. And it’s an act of mending broken things of the past, too, a backhand gift to history from a writer who liked, in her wisdom, to demonstrate that the given shape of things can – if we use our imaginations – be altered. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ By the end this catchphrase has been turned on its head. It ends in hope.

Carter’s last heroine knows how to role-reverse. She takes the potentially abject story of her own mother, Kitty, a mere ghost of a gone girl, and gives her a presence and a sexual power that’s ‘bold as brass’. ‘My Aunt Cynthia,’ Carter told Paul Bailey in the late radio interview, not long before she died,

Wise Children
lets the lost be found and the old be young. It invents impossible fertilities. It renews everything it touches. It bursts with energy, passion, wit, hilarity, hope, skill, art and love. Resurrective in so many ways, it’s Carter’s final legacy, and it’s a legacy of good, fierce, raucous potential. What a wisdom. What a joy.

Ali Smith, 2006

One

WHY IS LONDON
like Budapest?

A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.

Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.

Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of
rive gauche, rive droite
. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the
bastard
side of Old Father Thames.

Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city. You’d never believe the price of a house round here, these days. And what does the robin do then, poor thing?

Bugger the robin! What would have become of
us
, if Grandma hadn’t left us this house? 49 Bard Road, Brixton, London, South West Two. Bless this house. If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags, sucking on the bottle for comfort like babes unweaned, bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out again immediately for disturbing the peace, to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags. That’s a thought for a girl’s seventy-fifth birthday, what?

Yes! Seventy-five. Happy birthday to me. Born in this house, indeed, this very attic, just seventy-five years ago, today. I made my bow five minutes ahead of Nora who is, at this very moment, downstairs, getting breakfast. My dearest sister. Happy birthday to us.

This is
my
room. We don’t share. We’ve always respected one another’s privacy. Identical, well and good; Siamese, no. Everything slightly soiled, I’m sorry to say. Can’t be doing with wash, wash, wash, polish, polish, polish, these days, when time is so precious, but take a good look at the signed photos stuck in the dressing-table mirror – Ivor; Noel; Fred and Adèle; Jack; Ginger; Fred and Ginger; Anna, Jessie, Sonnie, Binnie. All friends and colleagues, once upon a time. See the newest one, a tall girl, slender, black curls, enormous eyes, no drawers, ‘your very own Tiffany’ and lots of XXXXXs. Isn’t she lovely? Our beloved godchild. We tried to put her off show business but she wasn’t having any. ‘What’s good enough for you two is good enough for me.’ ‘Show business’, right enough; a prettier girl than little Tiff you never saw but she’s showed her all.

What did we do? Got it in one. We used to be song and dance girls. We can still lift a leg higher than your average dog, if called for.

Hello, hello . . . here comes one of the pussy cats, out of the wardrobe, stretching and yawning. She can smell the bacon. There’s another, white, with marmalade patches, sleeping on my pillow. Dozens more roam freely. The house smells of cat, a bit, but more of geriatric chorine – cold cream, face powder, dress preservers, old fags, stale tea.

‘Come and have a cuddle, Pussy.’

You’ve got to have something to cuddle. Does Pussy want its breakfast, then? Give us a minute, Puss, let’s have a look out of the window.

Cold, bright, windy, spring weather, just like the day that we were born, when the Zeppelins were falling. Lovely blue sky, a birthday present in itself. I knew a boy, once, with eyes that colour, years ago. Bare as a rose, not a hair on him; he was too young for body hair. And sky-blue eyes.

You can see for miles, out of this window. You can see right across the river. There’s Westminster Abbey, see? Flying the St George’s cross, today. St Paul’s, the single breast. Big Ben, winking its golden eye. Not much else familiar, these days. This is about the time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again, like London Bridge in the nursery rhyme, goodbye, hello, but it’s never the same. Even the railway stations, changed out of recognition, turned into souks. Waterloo. Victoria. Nowhere you can get a decent cup of tea, all they give you is Harvey Wallbangers, filthy cappuccino. Stocking shops and knicker outlets everywhere you look. I said to Nora: ‘Remember
Brief Encounter
, how I cried buckets? Nowhere for them to meet on a station, nowadays, except in a bloody knicker shop. Their hands would have to shyly touch under cover of a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts.’

‘Come off it, you sentimental sod,’ said Nora. ‘The only brief encounter
you
had during the war was a fling with a Yank behind the public convenience on Liverpool Street Station.’

‘I was only doing my bit for the war effort,’ I replied sedately, but she wasn’t listening, she started to giggle.

‘’ere, Dor’, smashing name for a lingerie shop – Brief Encounter.’ She doubled up.

Sometimes I think, if I look hard enough, I can see back into the past. There goes the wind, again. Crash. Over goes the dustbin, all the trash spills out . . . empty cat-food cans, cornflakes packets, laddered tights, tea leaves . . . I am at present working on my memoirs and researching family history – see the word processor, the filing cabinet, the card indexes, right hand, left hand, right side, left side, all the dirt on everybody. What a wind! Whooping and banging all along the street, the kind of wind that blows everything topsy-turvy.

Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild!

And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.

We boast the only castrato grandfather clock in London.

The plaque on the dial of our grandfather in the front hall says it was made in Inverness in 1846 and, as far as I know, it is a unique example of an authentic Highland-style grandfather clock and as such was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its High-landness consists of a full set of antlers, eight points, on top of it. Sometimes we use the antlers as a hat rack, if either of us happens to go out wearing a hat, which doesn’t happen often, but now and then, when it rains. This clock has got a lot of sentimental value for Nora and me. It came to us from our father. His only gift and even then it came by accident. Great, tall, butch, horny mahogany thing, but it gives out the hours in a funny little falsetto ping and always the wrong hour, always out by one. We never got round to fixing it. To tell the truth, it makes us laugh, always has. It was all right until Grandma fixed it. All she did was tap it and the weights dropped off. She always had that effect on gentlemen.

But, as I passed by our grandfather clock this windy birthday morning, cats scampering in front of me maddened by the smell of bacon, it struck. And struck. And struck. And this time got it right, straight on the nosey – eight o’clock!

‘Nor’! Nor’! Something’s up! Granddad in the hall got the right time, for once!’

‘Something else is up, too,’ Nora says in a gratified voice and slings me a thick, white envelope with a crest on the back. ‘Our invites have arrived at last.’

She starts to pour out tea, while Wheelchair fizzes and stutters when I pull out that stiff, white card we thought would never come.

Wheelchair fizzed, sputtered and boiled right over; she screeched fit to bust but Nora consoled her:

‘Hold hard, ducky, we’re never going to leave you behind! Yes, Cinders, you
shall
go to the ball, even if you aren’t mentioned by name on the invite. Let’s have
all
the skeletons out of the closet, today, of all days! God knows, we deserve a spot of bubbly after all these years.’

I squinted at the RSVP, to that posh house in Regent’s Park and Lady Hazard, the third and present spouse. Whereas our poor old Wheelchair, here, was his first, which accounts for her spleen, as ex, at failing to feature personally on the invitation. And the Misses Leonora and Dora, that is, yours truly, are, of course, Sir Melchior Hazard’s daughters, though not, ahem, by any of his wives. We are his
natural
daughters, as they say, as if only unmarried couples do it the way that nature intended. His never-by-him officially recognised daughters, with whom, by a bizarre coincidence, he shares a birthday.

‘They’ve not given us much time to reply,’ I complained. ‘It’s only tonight, isn’t it?’

‘Something makes you think they don’t want us to go?’ Nora’s lost a couple of back molars, you can’t help but notice when she laughs. I’ve kept all mine. Otherwise, like as two peas, as ever was. Years ago, the only way you could tell us apart was by our perfume. She used Shalimar, me, Mitsouko.

All the same, identical we may be, but symmetrical – never. For the body itself isn’t symmetrical. One of your feet is bound to be bigger than the other, one ear will leak more wax. Nora is fluxy; me, constipated. She was always free with her money, squandered it on the fellers, poor thing, whereas I tried to put a bit by. Her menstrual flow was copious to a fault; mine, meagre. She said: ‘Yes!’ to life and I said, ‘Maybe . . .’ But we’re both in the same boat, now. Stuck with each other. Two batty old hags, buy us a drink and we’ll sing you a song. Even manage, a knees-up, on occasion, such as New Year’s Eve or a publican’s grandbaby.