Relatively Strange

by Marilyn Messik

  “Your parents?” I asked the question although I knew the answer.

  “We never saw them again.”

  “The rest of your family?” she shook her head.

  “All of them?”

  “All of them. When we were liberated we didn’t want to stay in Germany, couldn’t bear to. It was arranged we would come to England, we were very lucky.” I snorted, couldn’t help it,

  “Lucky?”

  “Yes,” for a moment her sister’s impatience was echoed. “You’ll find, my dear, I don’t use words lightly. We considered ourselves lucky to be alive and lucky that a family who’d come over years earlier took us in, looked after us, that we became fond of them and they of us. We studied, we learned the language quickly, we took exams,” she smiled sideways at me, softening the previous rebuke, “We did well, naturally, and in due course we both trained as teachers.”

  “And that’s what you do now?” I could visualise no insurrection in the classes of Miss P the elder. Ruth smiled catching the thought,

  “Both of us deal with tutoring special needs children, children who have physical, mental or learning difficulties. Some are damaged at birth, some come from broken or abusive homes and have suffered physically and hence emotionally all their lives, others have differing degrees of autism. Sometimes we’re a last resort, when all other avenues have been exhausted. There are those whose difficulties we can solve very easily, others who require much more from us, but there are few we cannot help, even if only a little. We’re actually rather successful at what we do, sometimes people say it’s as if we can see into the minds of these sad children.” She laughed, deliberately breaking the sombre mood and I smiled with her. Hamlet who I’d almost forgotten was there, raised his head briefly to look at us, whumpfed gently and lowered it again.

  “And sometimes, my dear, the children who need our help, need it desperately because they are like us in one way or another. You’ll do it, won’t you, help us get Sam out?” It wasn’t really a change of direction but where she’d been heading all along and far more statement than question. I was to learn about Ruth that she was master of emotional blackmail, with a knack for playing people in a way that, had her motives ever been less than pure, would have been downright immoral. Glory called them, she told me once, the Stick and the Carrot, both sisters achieving their ends equally effectively, albeit by differing methods.

  *

  There was much more, so much more I wanted to ask but after our brief, shockingly intimate and painful walk down her personal memory lane, I felt I knew Ruth more than a little. There was no doubt in my mind she was totally genuine and if she was, so were the others. As for Sam – well, I didn’t really think I had a choice. In the strange situation I found myself, all the time-consuming rituals of social intercourse and interaction were stripped away and openness was all that was left, no room for prevarication, compromise or empty courtesies. My earlier irritation had subsided to let in, if I’m honest, a gradually mounting sense of anticipatory excitement, albeit mixed with apprehension. This was an unsought and unthought of opportunity to find answers to questions that had been with me all my life.

  If I imagined though that things on that strangest of Saturdays couldn’t get much stranger, I was wrong. First, though there were practical arrangements. I phoned my parents who answered so swiftly they must have been sitting on it at their end. Launching cautiously into a carefully reasoned argument as to why I should be allowed to spend a few days with my new acquaintances, I was amazed when my mother said yes. I was even more astonished to find they’d already spent some time talking on the phone with Miss Peacock. I don’t know exactly what she’d said to them or they to her but once they’d received my assurance that I was fine and did want to stay, they acquiesced without further discussion, the only proviso being that I phone every day.

  “Now,” my mother said, “I’ve packed for a week and …”

  “Sorry?”

  “He came back.”

  “Who did?”

  “The tall gentleman.”

  “Ed?”

  “Yes Ed, lovely manners, he came back and picked up your bag.” I turned away from the phone,

  “Ruth, your sister sent Ed back to my house to get my things?” She nodded comfortably,

  “We thought you’d say yes dear.” I turned back to the phone. A person likes to at least maintain the fiction they’re in control of their own destiny; my mother in the meantime was listing things I should and shouldn’t do. She was concerned also that I’d arrived empty handed – no flowers, no chocolates, no joke! She’d remedied this with a big box of Black Magic in the top of my case but was that enough? Although she was putting a brave front on things, her acute anxiety was thrumming through the wires and my head and when she abruptly said goodbye and handed the phone to my father, I knew she hadn’t really just remembered she’d left something on the gas. My father was brusque, equally concerned and equally unskilled at hiding it but perhaps, like me, aware that in this strangely unfolding situation might lie answers to questions we’d never before been able to put to anyone.

  *

  Glory showed me up to the room I’d be occupying for my stay, finding her way unerringly without use of the stick, just lightly touching the bannister as we went up the stairs. She indicated a bathroom to the left in the upstairs hallway then opened the door of a small sunny room with brightly patterned, heavily lined, floral curtains in cream and pink, looped back from a window netted in white and slightly open to let in fresh air. The bed was piled high with pillows and what I learned was a continental down duvet. A thickly luxurious cream rug was on the floor and, incongruously familiar in these new surroundings, one of our large, metal cornered, rigid black and battered suitcases from home.

  One wall here too was book-lined and a vase of yellow tulips brightened the dressing table and scented the air, there was even a small radio – everything ready for a guest, including a still-cellophaned toothbrush and toothpaste at the side of the sink. Glory must have caught the thought, because she nodded.

  “We often have unexpected guests, we’re always prepared. I’ll let you unpack but first …” She surged into my head, briskly took the defences of which I was so proud, altered them a bit and then let me explore what she’d done. The change was subtle. Like looking at an optical illusion, a vase becoming, with only a subtle shift in perception, two witch’s faces. I immediately grasped what she’d done and its resultant strength.

  She withdrew and tried to get back in again. I successfully kept her out for a while but she was too strong. I grimaced, she laughed,

  “Practise’ll make perfect. Come down when you’re ready, we eat about seven.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I re-entered the living room cautiously, I didn’t care how friendly Hamlet was held to be, he was still a question mark in my mind. Ed, incongruously clad in a floral plastic apron – sadly inadequate for the substantial area it had to cover – was to my surprise, busy in the kitchen. He looked round as I came in but when I smiled across at him, merely nodded his head and returned to stirring something. He wasn’t the friendliest of souls, but at least supper seemed in the offing and smelt good, it’d had been a long afternoon and I was pretty peckish.

  Ruth was working on a pile of papers spread over the kitchen table and raised a hand in greeting but didn’t look up. Glory and Miss Peacock, who was knitting – I wondered if she was responsible for Ruth’s jumper and if so she needed suing – were seated one on each of the facing sofas. A paperback book suddenly hurtled through the air and thwacked me hard on the forehead. I staggered backwards.

  “Ow!” I clapped a hand to the injured area. Miss Peacock tutted,

  “Slow.” Rubbing my head, I was indignant,

  “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “It’s the unexpected you’ll have to deal with. Catch.” This time I was ready and caught the cushion that shot towards me. But it fought and bucked in my hands like an animal and was
covering my face, even as I struggled to get it off.

  “Break her hold.” Ruth had glanced up, but at first I didn’t understand the calmly issued instruction. As fast as I backed away, the cushion followed, blocking my mouth and nose, extruding sharp feathered ends that scratched my cheek.

  In my confusion and rising discomfort I felt Glory in my head – so much for my newly reinforced shielding. Again she showed me something from a slightly different angle, how to visualise where the control of the cushion was and how to snap it. With the thought came the result and the offending object, inanimate now, dropped to the floor. I was breathless and there were a couple of feathers in my mouth which I spat out resentfully.

  “Again.” I snapped and another cushion slammed into me. I felt outwards, focusing on the strength that was powering it and I snapped the control, sending it triumphantly and harmlessly to the floor.

  “To me.” Miss Peacock ordered. I swiftly bent and picked up the cushion, years of conditioning hadn’t fallen on deaf ears – hands, always use the hands!

  “No,” she lashed, I dropped the cushion, picked it up with my mind, shot it forward and felt as she snapped my control before it got anywhere near her. It plummeted, knocking off balance a large silver jug of fatly pink peonies which teetered for a second or two on the table before over-ending. Flowers and water shot over the head of the nearby sleeping dog who leapt up, barking wildly in fright and in the general melee I thought – if I’m quick – grabbed a particularly plump bloom and sent it to Miss Peacock, lodging it fetchingly and incongruously behind her right ear.

  “Enough now,” Ruth bustled over, righting the jug, mopping the water with a cloth and consoling the quivering mass that was Hamlet.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this in here Rachael, that’s why we have downstairs.”

  “Sorry,” Miss Peacock removed the flower and nodded at me,

  “Sit,” I went over to take the place next to Glory.

  “Shield.” reminded Glory. I did and could feel as they both began to probe. I held on as long as I could but they were strong and broke through easily. I clenched my jaw and tried again. This time I held out longer.

  “Better. Now, light that.” Miss Peacock pointed at a pile of logs and kindling arranged in the stone surround fireplace in the corner.

  I looked at the wood with trepidation, this was strictly forbidden, a taboo ground deep into my psyche from the time we’d attended a firework party given by two-doors-away neighbours – intriguingly already lightly brushed with scandal – the word was she’d been an au pair, he the father of her charge and they’d run off together. When we pitched up at their house, ‘Dun Roamin’ I remember my mother wondering whether that was a statement from him or an instruction from her.

  I hadn’t wanted to go to the party, mood unimproved by their obnoxious son, ten going on five who kept poking me painfully in the back with an unlit sparkler and running away. I only meant to light the wretched firework and give him a fright but it turned out to be a case of over-egging the pudding. I lit not only his sparkler, which he flung away with a satisfactory yelp of shock, but also unfortunately a further selection of sparklers. It wasn’t, and I maintain that to this day, my fault that the sparklers happened to be at the bottom of all the other fireworks. Alarmed at what I’d started and panicked into a bit of muddled thinking, I tried to take the heat out of the situation by re-directing it elsewhere and inadvertently ignited the bonfire. Chaos reigned as the fire, meticulously prepared with just the right quantities of dry wood and a well-dressed guy on the top, whooshed cheerfully into action and crackled, spat and burned in the centre of the lawn, while a couple of hundred pounds worth of fireworks went off in the space of three minutes. It was, you might say, a party that went with a bang.

  What they lacked in telepathic skills, my parents always more than made up for with instinctively accurate guess-work and there was no doubt in their minds who was to blame for the Great Firework Fiasco. The next day my father hauled me down to the local library. I don’t know how he found the book he showed me, but it featured fire disasters through the years and by the time we’d worked our way through that – sepia photographs of contorted-faced factory girls screaming on window sills, sooted firemen and unconscious, unrecognisable stretchered victims – he’d made his point and I ring-fenced that particular part of my ability so tightly I rarely remembered it was there. Now, I was being asked to use it again. I shook my head firmly,

  “I won’t do that.” Ruth, stacking her papers now and capping her pen, looked at me over half-moon reading glasses,

  “You should you know, learn to control it. Never let it control you. That’s the coward’s way of dealing.” I glared at her. I really hated the way they strolled in and out of my head like there was a set of swing doors with a welcome notice.

  “Shield better and we won’t.” Glory was smug. I gritted my teeth and flung the frustration at the fire. Miss Peacock nodded judiciously as the wood started to smoke then smoulder.

  “Not bad. Ed, have we time before we eat?” Ed, expressionless as always, cutting vegetables briskly, said over his shoulder,

  “Five minutes all right?” His voice was light, not at all the sound you’d expect from that frame and I realised they were the first words I’d heard him utter. A stainless steel colander swung through the air towards him. He reached for it, tipped in the carrots, rinsed them under the tap, turned them smoothly into a waiting saucepan and moved over to check the soup. Ruth meanwhile, left the table and came over, bouncing herself down on the sofa next to her sister with a little sigh of pleasure, removing her glasses and rubbing forefinger and thumb on the bridge of her nose.

  “Damn glasses pinch.”

  “Take them back, they need adjusting. Do you understand what I mean by a gestalt?” I realised Miss Peacock had addressed her second sentence to me. I shook my head,

  “Sounds like something my Grandmother might cook.” Miss P gave this small sally the respect it deserved and ignored it,

  “Easier to show you. Here.” she reached over the coffee table and took Glory’s hand, Glory in turn extended her’s in my direction. I hesitated for just a second before taking it, small and cool in mine then felt Ruth, her touch familiar now, grasp my other one. Connection to the three older women was an experience that even today, even after it’s happened many times since in one form or another and in a variety of circumstances, not all of them good, is still almost impossible to describe.

  I could sense and taste them individually. Peppermint Miss Peacock, Glory’s lemon-sherbert fizz and a rich purple-deep lavender that was Ruth. I could feel the falling away of their smooth, rigid-walled screening and, my recent encounter with Ruth still raw in my mind, for an instant tried to pull away but they didn’t let go physically or mentally and the strength of what was happening kept me locked in place. I could see now how carefully and meticulously they protected and preserved their privacy, how multi-layered and carefully constructed were their defences and even in this most intimate of moments, there were areas I was unable to reach. But rising from the combination of their minds was something greater and more powerful than I could have imagined. And, unhesitating now, I joined with them and gasped at the increase, the surge in the power as I did. And I felt, through their hands and their minds their acknowledgement of me and my contribution as an equal.

  *

  How long we sat joined I’m not sure, probably only a matter of minutes before the contact was broken gently, first on my left by Glory and then slowly by Ruth on my right. Loss and relief warred briefly and equally strongly.

  “Powerful stuff eh?” Glory matter of factly, put both hands in the small of her back and stretched first to one side then the other.

  “Understand now?” Miss Peacock had also risen and was setting out cutlery at the kitchen table. I nodded, still shaken. I couldn’t believe she could move so swiftly from that soaring sharing to the prosaic task of laying the table. She continued,

 
“Of course, the stronger the component parts, the greater the effectiveness of the grouping, physical closeness is good but not essential, we can work from a distance too.”

  “Effectiveness?” I was intrigued, “What do you do with it?”

  “Plenty.” She was a real specialist in the oblique. “Shall we eat?”

  Ed was carrying brimming soup bowls to the table, one in each hand, three floating along next to him. His face was expressionless as ever as he concentrated on no spillage. Someone had pulled full length, pale gold drapes together to cover the windows, so the large room behind us which earlier had been so light and bright and open to the garden was now lamp and fire-lit and cosily enclosed. The scent of good food and Hamlet’s snoring blended companionably with the pop and crackle of flames as they worked their way through the logs I’d so frighteningly easily ignited.

  The meal was delicious, Ed apparently a devoted Fanny Craddock fan. This was, Glory pointed out between mouthfuls, hugely important, because she and the Peacock sisters didn’t have a domestic instinct between them. As it was, we sat down to rich home-made chicken soup which grandma wouldn’t have been ashamed to call her own, followed by chicken and crisp potatoes with buttered carrots, comfortably finished off with chunky slices of apple pie and ice cream, Ed’s own apparently!