The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  I think of this woman in the delicatessen, asking her questions and ordering her ham. I recall her voice, the precision of it, so English. But don’t all people of a certain class sound the same?

  Vanessa’s mother had auburn hair, I remember, but she may well have dyed it. This woman’s hair is hidden under her hat. But this woman is old – older than Vanessa’s mother would be now, surely? Though maybe not. I need to see her face again; I need a second look. I mean, it isn’t inconceivable that Mrs Reiber – my Mrs Reiber – should live in Kew now. More likely that than that she’d have stayed on in Oakley, surely?

  But is it her?

  On she walks, with her heels clacking hollowly on the concrete pavement. But look at the state of her shoes, and those poor ripped tights. Why would Vanessa’s mother be dressed like that? Why would any woman with a diamond the size of a conker on her finger be dressed like that? But Vanessa’s mother?

  I think perhaps I’ll cross the road and walk on ahead, then cross back again and return so that I’ll get to walk past the woman, face to face. I need to see her eyes again. Vanessa had the most amazing eyes: clear pale blue. Like that stone you can get, aquamarine. Vanessa was the most beautiful person I have ever seen.

  But then the woman abruptly stops, and so I stop, too. And my heart, which has been beating fast and steadily, cranks up a notch; I can almost hear it in the sudden silence of the street. She turns – not to me, but to the gate on her left, which creaks as she pushes it open. It’s a waist-high black iron gate, attached to the railings enclosing a small front garden, dense with exotic plants: palm grasses and some kind of cactus reaching up its cowboy-film arms, and a monkey tree, crowding down over the path. Without looking in my direction, she closes the gate behind her and makes her way through this miniature jungle to the front door. She can’t have seen me, and now I do cross the road, for fear of being caught spying, and I saunter on past, as nonchalantly as possible. And in a little while I saunter back again. She’s gone inside the house now; there’s a light on, in the hall. I can see the glow of it through the small window on the black front door, and faintly, through the bigger window to the side. Like Oliver’s, it’s a Victorian house, though narrower, with one big bay window at the front. As I loiter outside, another light comes on and the bay is lit up; I see her walk into the room then and approach the window. Startled, I react like a thief and catch myself slinking into the shadows, head bowed. I glance up one more time as I pass by, and see her reaching up an arm to draw the curtains, and as she does so she peers out with her face close up to the glass, squinting into the darkness, as if at last she can sense that I’m there. And I fancy that I can see her eyes. I can’t, of course, not from here, not in the dark. But I fancy that I can.

  Her eyes were the first thing I noticed about Vanessa. You couldn’t not notice them. You couldn’t not be stunned. Not just by the colour, but by the shape of them too, oval as almonds. She had sharp features, witch-like almost, and the palest skin. And when you’d got over this, there was the hair – masses of it, long and thick, and as yellow as gold. She was so beautiful that the first time I met her I could barely speak. First I felt astonished by her, and then unnerved, in a whispering, glance-over-your-shoulder kind of way. And that unnerved feeling never left me. She wasn’t of this world; I’ll say it now, but I knew it then, too.

  Now, I walk on by, but I imagine that woman is at the window, watching me. I feel the pull of her imagined stare at my shoulders. My head is racing with the things I might say – that she might say – and I turn around, and I am convinced that it is Vanessa’s mother, and that she will be there, beckoning me, recognition warm upon her face. Rachel, she will say. Rachel. And that will be enough.

  But what I see is a dark and empty street, and that house, like most of the houses, is curtained up against the night now. And the fact of it is that even if that woman is Vanessa’s mother, she wouldn’t know me. Vanessa had so many friends; they came and went through her house in Oakley as easily as if it was their own. They slept there; they came for party after party. Friends called Fay and Annabel and Dominic and Tristram – see, I remember their names. And they called Vanessa’s mother by her first name – Yolande. See, I remember that, too.

  Oh, Yolande, they said, I’m going to get completely drunk tonight. And Yolande, you’ve got to lend me that dress, it’s gorgeous!

  Vanessa’s mother might have recognized and remembered any one of those other friends, but not me. She probably never noticed me at all. Why would she?

  I was just the one on the edge of things; the hanger-on.

  I am late getting back for Jono. I manage to get myself lost, taking a wrong turning here, heading down a wrong street there. I walk myself into a circle, till I come across my car and work out where I am.

  It’s twenty to seven when I ring the bell. Amy opens the door promptly, as if she has been waiting. People like Amy don’t expect people like me to be late, to have other things to do.

  ‘Was there a lot of traffic?’ she asks, and her smile is a little thin.

  ‘No, I . . .’ I start to tell her – what? That I wandered around just killing time till I took it upon myself to follow some complete stranger, onto whom I projected the most ridiculous of dreams? ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I got delayed.’

  Jono is ready. Out he comes from the room to the left of the hall with his shoes already on, scowling at me, and we say our goodbyes.

  Out in the street he says, ‘What did you have to go and call me Jono for?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ I say.

  ‘Oliver laughed at me.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, he did. And he’ll go telling everyone at school, and they’ll all laugh at me, too.’

  I sigh. ‘For God’s sake, Jonathan, do you have to be so sensitive?’

  And he shuts up. Normally I’d launch into a long-winded explanation about friends not being your friends if they laugh at you, and how you mustn’t show that you mind when people tease you, and so on and so on, but not today. Today I can’t be doing with the arguing and the apologizing and the general wrenching that is my relationship with my son. I am too busy thinking about that woman, and about Vanessa. I am too busy sounding together in my head the connections: the blue eyes, the name, the fact that that woman would be the same age or thereabouts. These things cannot surely be mere coincidence?

  I cannot let it go. Jono throws himself sulkily into the back of the car and I start it up, and drive back the way I walked, back towards that house. I drive slowly; I want to remember the way, I want to be sure of it, so I can find it again. And as I come to the house I slow right down and Jonathan wails, ‘What are you doing?’ and slams himself against the back seat in impatience.

  I stare at that house. I lock it in my memory. The dust-faded black of the paintwork around the windows; the secretive, muted glow of the light from within. But when I try to imagine what it might be like inside, it is the house in Oakley that I see. I see the den downstairs in the basement where no adults ever ventured – and no wonder, Vanessa said, because the whole place was haunted as hell. We went down there, but we’d be sure to be drunk or stoned and always in a crowd. I see the living room upstairs with the balcony overlooking the green, and Vanessa’s bedroom with the bunk beds that she used for sleepovers pressed up against the wall, and her own bed, queen-sized with its pale-yellow duvet and her old blue rabbit seated upon the pillow. I picture us, six of us at least, crammed onto the top bunk with our legs hanging over the side, jostling for space, saying, Move up, I can’t move, but loving the closeness, all of us, just loving it. I picture Vanessa, lying on her bed, propped up on one elbow and watching us, cat-like. Plenty of room down here, she’d purr, but if any of us ventured down she’d pounce on us, tickling us to death and doing that thing she did with her nails, sticking them in you – one, two, three, four in a row and then all over again, one, two, three, four – till your muscles turned to mush, and you were helpless, begging
her to stop. She said her dad had taught her to do that; it was a trick he’d picked up in Thailand.

  And I picture Vanessa’s mother opening the front door to more guests and sending them up the stairs to join us. ‘She’s entertaining in her bedroom,’ I hear her call in her lush, theatrical drawl.

  And Vanessa laughing back, ‘Mummy! You make me sound like a whore!’

  ‘Can we just go?’ Jonathan pleads now behind me, and I drag my eyes away from that house and look at him in the mirror. I see his face flushed and petulant. He is tired. He wants to go home. Jonathan lives in a world where there is just himself to think about; just his own wants and needs, and I am merely ancillary to that world. That I could be anything more than just his mother – nurturer, facilitator, recipient of blame – is unthinkable to Jonathan. That there could ever have been anything more to my life would never enter his head. It’s just not possible.

  Andrew is sitting at the kitchen table, attending to some mail. He looks up when we come in.

  ‘Hello, Jono,’ he says. ‘Have a good time, old boy?’

  I notice that Jonathan doesn’t scold his father for the use of his nickname. I notice also the way in which Andrew’s face lights up when he looks at his son, his eyes warm with open love, a hunger almost. This must be the same expression that I wear, too, when I look at Jono. We feast upon our son. We drink him in, his every move. He is the essence of our lives, our morning, noon and night. Is he happy, is he hungry, is he doing well at school? Does he have enough friends, too many video games, the right things to eat? We worry and we fret and it holds us together.

  And this is what Jonathan must see: two sad and anxious people forever watching him. This is what he rebels against.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ he says now, and pulls away.

  That light in Andrew’s eyes dims a little when he looks at me. His face becomes guarded, and careful. ‘What did you do?’ he asks.

  And I say, ‘Christmas shopping.’

  And he accepts this. He doesn’t probe for more. He doesn’t say, But where did you go? or What did you buy? Andrew always accepts what I say without question, and I don’t know if that is because he trusts me, or because he doesn’t really care.

  He turns back to his letters now, and I open the fridge to take out the chicken and peppers for supper. I put a pan upon the hob for rice, I turn on the oven, I start to chop, and Andrew sorts his papers into piles. For a moment I want to tell him about what happened in Kew, about the woman and how I followed her. Do you think it could be Vanessa’s mother? I want to ask.

  And he would say, Who is Vanessa?

  And I would tell him. I would; I would tell him.

  But Andrew doesn’t ask. ‘I’ll go and see what Jono’s up to,’ he says, and he leaves me alone.

  Later, I lie in my bed with my body very, very still. I am not asleep, but I am not fully awake, either. I lie on my back, and sink myself away.

  Vaguely I am aware of the click of the bedroom door as Andrew opens it, and of the pause as he checks that I am asleep. Then he creeps in, and from my still place I open my eyes for a moment and watch as he undresses, careful to make no noise. I see the shadow of him, stooping in the dark, struggling to pull first his socks and then his trousers off over his feet. He goes into our bathroom and I listen to the running of taps, the brushing of teeth. When he comes back out, he closes the door quietly behind him, and again he pauses and I know that he is looking at me. I am so still that I am barely breathing and behind my closed eyes the darkness is a funnel, spiralling away, like space, going on and on.

  I feel the dip of the bed as Andrew gets in beside me, and the gentle tug of the duvet. I hear him sigh. And so we lie there, both of us, each locking the other out. I wish that he would touch me, but I cannot make the first move. I cannot bring myself to come back to him. And soon he is asleep, as he supposes me to be. And then I am truly alone.

  I picture myself inside an envelope; I tuck myself in, the sides, the bottom, the top. I fold myself away. But the ghosts come anyway, weaving their way through my dreams.

  TWO

  I was fifteen when I met Vanessa. I knew her for less than a year. I was a friend by association, that’s all. A friend of a friend.

  And yet.

  She was Leanne’s friend, from school. Leanne lived opposite me, in the big house with the mismatched extension over the garage. And we were like sisters, Leanne and me, wandering in and out of each other’s houses, sharing each other’s things. Like sisters, and yet so different; her family so unlike mine. I think of her parents – so glamorous, so modern, so often not there. I think of Leanne and me, creeping into her parents’ bedroom and opening her mother’s wardrobe to see all those dresses hanging there, so many of them, shimmering and sparkling and swooshing against each other as we touched them. I think of the ashtrays on the bedside tables, and the glasses, and the decanter half-full of wine, and of her mother’s jewellery box (the size of our TV), with all its drawers and trays and secret compartments crammed with earrings and bracelets and beads.

  And I remember one summer’s evening, just as the sun was going down; I must have been about ten, and I was balanced on the wall outside our house. My parents were out there, too, watering the garden; I remember the soft, gentle hiss of the hosepipe, and the patter of water hitting the grass. As usual, I was looking over at Leanne’s house in the expectation of something happening. And then a taxi pulled up in our quiet, dull street and the driver got out and knocked on Leanne’s front door, and my parents stopped what they were doing and stood there and stared. And they carried on staring as Leanne’s parents emerged from the house, her mother in a long blue dress, her father in a dinner suit with a white jacket and tie. And so we were all staring: me in admiration, my parents in a sort of dumbfounded amazement.

  ‘Well, hello there,’ Leanne’s father called, and he raised an arm high in an exaggerated greeting. And then Leanne’s mother bent down and got into the car, and Leanne’s father patted her cheekily on the bottom and got in, too. And we heard them laughing.

  I watched them drive away.

  ‘More money than sense,’ my father said.

  And my mother said, ‘Mmm.’

  I think of this now. I think of them all with fondness: my parents so quiet, so very, very ordinary; Leanne’s parents, so not the same.

  I went to the comprehensive in Ashcroft where we lived, along with most of the kids from our junior school, but Leanne’s parents sent her to the private girls’ school in Westbury. And whereas I grew up skulking around Ashcroft at night with my school friends, finding dark corners in which to drink cheap vodka from the bottle and smoke cigarettes bought by the ten, Leanne’s friends – well, they were from a different world entirely.

  She told me about them. About Annabel, whose father was a record producer and was forever having pop stars round to their house; and about Fay, who’d lived in Kenya till she was eleven and could speak Swahili. About the boys they passed around among themselves – friends of Vanessa’s brother mostly, so easy, so happy to be shared. And about Vanessa, of course, whose house they all went to in Oakley.

  Soon I started going to the parties, too.

  I remember the first one, the first time I met Vanessa. She opened the door to Leanne and me; she draped her thin arms around our shoulders, said, ‘Hi, come in, come in . . .’ I remember the clink of her bracelets next to my ear, and against my face the soft press of her hair, which she’d back-combed into a wild Pre-Raphaelite mass. She smelled of White Linen, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know it until years later, when I was walking through a department store and the girl on the Estée Lauder counter slipped a perfume sample into my bag, and when I got home and split it open, it was like she was there in my room: Vanessa, the smell of her, the sound of her voice, the memory of her, so real. For years I kept that tiny perfume bottle. For years and years, long after the scent had all faded away.

  She was dressed all in blue – I remember t
hat, too – in a baby-cord jacket and matching low-waisted trousers, and on her feet the most amazing shoes: six-inch cherry-red patent stilettos that made her taller than ever. And there was me, in a black ra-ra skirt and ballet pumps. We followed her down to the den in the basement, and there they all were, all these people I’d heard so much about. There was Annabel, so out of it already, hugging me like she’d known me all her life and saying, ‘Rachel, your skirt is so sweet . . .’ And Tristram – who, according to rumour, had three testicles and therefore three times the sex drive – sitting on a sofa with one ankle crossed over his knee, and patting the cushion next to him, saying, ‘Rachel, Rachel, come over here with me.’ Tristram, with his huge brown eyes fringed with such thick, dark lashes. Tristram, who two years later sat alone in his bedroom and inhaled the butane gas from a lighter refill, and turned blue, and died. I did sit next to him for a while, and he did put his arm around me. His body, next to mine, was warm in his soft cotton shirt.

  And there was Vanessa saying, ‘Be careful, Rachel, he’s a naughty boy.’ And to Tristram, laughingly, ‘You leave my friend alone.’

  My friend, my friend.

  When the party got going, they drank cocktails mixed with tequila and vermouth and fizzy white wine, and Vanessa made punch, into which everything went. And the girls smoked Consulate menthol cigarettes because they came in all different colours to match their clothes, and everyone smoked dope. Vanessa’s brother had a deck system, complete with projecting lights that flashed over the people dancing in the middle of the room; and around the edges of the room, where it was dark, people melded down together in twos. You couldn’t see who was with whom, but it didn’t matter because it felt just like everyone was with everyone.