Then there was the café. This was not on any of our usual routes, being up the main road, beyond the roundabout, on its way out of town. Also, we were forbidden to go near it. It was a place for trippers, that hated category of humankind. Trippers were common. And the road was busy, with no pavements. We were likely to get sucked into the traffic and tumbled to bits, like the unidentifiable, torn but still furry things we sometimes spotted in the middle of the tarmac. 'Don't ever let me catch you going near the café,' my mother warned. No, we won't ever let you catch us, we replied.
The café was a bungalow, too, of sorts: a low ramshackle building with a wooden frame and an overhanging wooden canopy at the front. It had a forecourt of muddy pink gravel for cars to pull into in search of thick white cups of strong tea, and egg and bacon breakfasts, and soup of the day (tinned). There were peeling posters along the front, for long-gone circuses and firework displays and somebody or other's big band sound which just showed the mouth of a saxophone and lower legs of a musician in the kind of trousers nobody wore any more.
The fact that the café was prohibited made it more appealing to us. Mandy was always pining to go along there when she came to visit us on Saturdays. Whether we would give in or not felt like a matter of power, until she learned to threaten, 'If we don't go, I'll tell that you did anyway.' So we usually went, creeping along the roadside on the strip of dirty grass between the traffic and the bushes, hoping no one who knew us was driving past. We didn't ever go inside. We just hung around and peered in through the grimy windows, and read the menu, which was fixed to a post out front. Sausage and egg. Egg and chips. Sausage, egg and chips. And beans. You could have beans with any combination. Mandy used to stand nearest to the door, her nose raised to catch the seductive scent of frying pans. Then we'd tear another strip off an old poster and scurry home, out of harm's way.
In town there were the big shops. Behind the seafront was a huge main street, with slabs of buildings: department stores, offices, banks. Sometimes I would go in with Mum on Saturday mornings on the bus, if there was something important to be bought, like new shoes or a winter coat. It was the one activity where Mum didn't find my proximity a nuisance. I don't remember Brian coming with us, though he must have, sometimes. Even he must have needed shoes, and school uniform, from time to time. I don't remember us being driven in by Dad. Shopping, my mother implied, was a female duty. 'Oh, I daren't trust your father,' she'd say. 'Goodness knows what he'd come back with!' Men were impatient, awkward shoppers: it made them choose badly, neither wisely nor well. And they couldn't see the point of the shops we preferred, where leisurely choice and comfort were doled out in equal measure. Because shopping was also, just possibly, a female pleasure.
I thought the department stores were heavenly. A world with looser purse-strings was on display here, an arena of endless things. Everything was arranged to engage the senses. You walked from place to place on patterned carpet, taking in the sights, the scents. There were chairs at the end of the counters, not for the sales staff but for weary customers, and on the top floor, after a smooth upward ride in the lift, there was a tinkling restaurant. A department store was like Mandy's bedside cupboard full of sweets, repeated over and over on a grand scale, and catering to every taste.
The salesladies, dressed in black with white collars, had fierce plucked and painted eyebrows and fiercer hairdos. My mother never tangled with them, if she could help it. She liked to find what we were looking for herself. It was purgatory if the right size was not there, under our hands. She hated to ask, and if one of the gorgons bore down on us with a 'Can I help you, modom?' she would always put the item hastily down, muttering, 'No thanks, we're just looking,' and hurry off to another department. Like shoplifters almost caught in the act.
But I loved it. I would have liked to test the gorgon's mettle, and mine. I would have said, if she'd let me, 'Yes, do you have this in blue? In a size ten? Do you have anything similar, only cheaper?' But that would have paralysed my mother with embarrassment. These ladies were not to be troubled. They were formidable, like headmistresses. They mustn't know what you were up to. What were the limits of your purse, or the size of your bust. As far as Mum was concerned, it was better not to be noticed at all.
14
Mixing
Lorna doesn't ask about my brother Brian. Not at the moment. I don't know why she's so circumspect. Perhaps she's saving him up for a special occasion.
When he was younger, Brian was small but thickset, built like a tortoise or an armoured tank. He had short dark hair, run through with a wet comb until you could see its tracks across his head, like plough marks on a field. He wore National Health glasses with brown wire rims and his eyes were hazel. He wasn't a thinking boy; he was good with his hands.
There were only a handful of other children who lived in the bungalows, and we often played with them, although they weren't what you'd call friends. I think we might even have hated each other. But it was a case of expediency. Children herded together because adults expected them to, and what else was there to do? 'I'm playing out,' we used to call, following up quickly with a slam of the front door, so that the words 'Don't slam that door!' always pursued us up the path. Playing out was the main pursuit for children of primary school age, an all-encompassing term, slippery and useful.
There were two sisters, younger than us, who were often out on the pavement, chalking squares for hopscotch or jogging up and down to the slow slap-slap of a skipping rope. I'd get Brian to tie them into harnesses of string, and then we'd gallop them down the pavement, imagining they were our chariot horses. Sometimes the string was under their arms, but sometimes we made them hold it in their mouths and pulled it tight. And there was a very small boy who rode a tricycle with a huge bin on the back. I'd keep him distracted and Brian would sneak up and put great heavy bricks in the bin, or rattling sticks and stones, for the pure pleasure of watching him pedal away, stop, frown, go round to the back and look inside. If it was bricks, he would take them out and carefully stack them in the gutter, so that he wouldn't bump into them; but if it was sticks or stones he would often have a look and leave them in there, then pedal off again, noisily. Leaving us in a helpless heap of laughter. He always fell for our tricks.
We were forbidden to go into the fields or along the main road: much too dangerous. We had to keep to the pavements outside the bungalows. Neither Brian nor I asked anyone back to our house – we knew without enquiring that our mother wouldn't have liked it. Nor did we get asked into anyone else's. It wasn't the done thing. Or maybe they just didn't like us.
At school there were groups of girls that I hovered on the edge of, girls I would seem to get friendly with one day, but come the next day I would be back at square one again, ignored, left out, not knowing how I had got there. I used to look at pairs of 'best friends' walking arm in arm around the playground, or sitting side by side on the steps, and not know what it was that cemented them together. Then Barbara came, loose and friendly, seeking me out. She didn't seem to mind at first when, out of shyness, I rebuffed her. She didn't seem to care whether or not I wanted to be her friend, but she kept on offering. So that was how it was done, I thought. You opened up like a flower, taking the sun, taking the rain, the wind, whatever comes. I looked at the pairs of girls with a new eye, cool and detached now, because I had a friend, too.
I noticed that Brian had made a sort of friend as well, a boy of his own age called Pete whose family had moved into the road behind the shops. He and Pete didn't talk much. They rode fast up and down on their bikes, or dodged behind bushes and made machine-gun noises. They knew what they were doing, and they didn't need to chat about it.
I don't know why we found this friendship thing so hard to do, Brian and me. Why we hung back, and couldn't make ourselves likeable, and didn't understand the rules. Maybe it was a hangover from our years in the children's home, or getting adjusted to our new family. All that time I just can't remember. Must have had some effect on us. Well, th
at's one of my theories. It's almost something I might welcome a professional opinion on, from Lorna or some eagle-eyed colleague of hers. Almost, but not quite. Not worth going out on a limb for. I mean, it's just a theory.
Brian must have seen I'd started to go next door, but he didn't comment on it, and he didn't tell on me. It was an unspoken knowledge between us, something to do with my parents' hatred of the hedge, with the frightening glamour of the shrieks and laughter that came from beyond it, with my deep desire not to be suburban and the deeply ingrained suburban nature that was in both of us.
Or maybe I'm making all that up. Maybe he was completely unaware. Which would account for his formidable discretion.
Barbara never came to call on me. As far as I know she never set foot on our garden path. Maybe she didn't want to taint herself. She'd drift past the front gate, and if I spotted her as I was gazing out of my bedroom window I would hurry outside. 'I'm just playing,' I'd call to my mother. 'Playing out.' Once, stooping to put empty, rinsed milk bottles on the doorstep, Mum glanced up and asked, 'Who's that?'
'What – that girl?' I sounded terribly innocent. 'Think she lives up near the shops.' Brian's friend Pete lived up near the shops. It was a useful address, nicely unspecific, by which anyone exotic could be safely located and explained. My mother took no more notice, went inside and shut the door. The windows of our kitchen and our lounge looked out on to the back garden. If they hadn't, she might have noticed more.
I'm glad I've got a friend in here. I'm glad I met Hanny. You wouldn't want any of the others for your boon companion. I went into the lounge this morning and there was a blonde woman standing in the middle of the carpet, just wringing and wringing her hands, scrubbing them with invisible soap and water. So I backed out into the hall, and there stood Rose, with a bread roll she must have stolen from the breakfast table, tearing it into tiny little pieces without looking at what she was doing, and scattering them all over the hall floor and down the corridor. A trail of bread balls: Hare and Hounds, but nobody wants to catch up with Rose.
God, it's just like being back in the school playground, except that everyone's friendless now. Apart from me and Hanny.
The Hennessys, like kings and queens, didn't mix with common folk. Or that was the impression they gave. They lived aloof, certainly the adults did. Just as much as my parents, only in a different way. Their home was their castle and they carried on as if they'd been there for generations, ever since the house was built, pretending that they couldn't even see the incursion of neat little redbrick, red-roofed bungalows, creeping up to their very doorstep. And like kings and queens they only consorted with other royalty, ambassadors from foreign courts, a flock of outlandish friends who alighted at intervals, arriving from nowhere and departing at the drop of a hat.
'Whose car is that outside?' Stella enquired, one Sunday afternoon when she was round to tea. 'That great big shiny Humber?'
My mother flashed her a 'don't ask' look, but my father, undoing the bottom two buttons of his knitted waistcoat and settling back in his chair with a sigh, said, 'Oh, you know, next door,' and tossed his chin and flung up his eyebrows in one speaking gesture. I liked the way he could do that. It made me think I knew what he had looked like as a boy, a schoolboy sitting unimpressed at the back of the class.
'Next door?' repeated Stella, lightly. She knew all about the hedge outrage. Not above a bit of stirring was good old Stella. 'No – I was just thinking – I like the look of that car.'
'Blocking the road up with some visitors or other,' grumbled my father. 'Causing inconvenience to other people. Ought to build a proper driveway. They've got enough room.'
'More tea, anyone?' asked my mother, already filling Stella's cup.
'And I liked his waistcoat,' added Stella, teasingly, plying the jug of evaporated milk over her mandarin orange slices.
'Whose?' Dad asked sharply.
'Chap getting out of the car when we arrived. Red, it was. Silk, I should think. Bit of a swagger, a red silk waistcoat.' And she glanced at my father's grey-marl cable knit, handmade by my mum.
'Give it a rest, Stella,' said Gloria, who had finished eating and was sitting with her arms folded. 'Honestly, man-mad,' she added, as if that was all it had been about.
One Saturday afternoon, in the summer after I met Barbara, Mandy was at our house. As on every Saturday afternoon. It was hot and overcast, and I suppose we were all irritable. 'Why don't you go out?' my mother suggested. 'Mandy might like to go to the sweet shop. You've had your pocket money.' Her voice was wheedling and kind. Oh, thanks a bunch. Mandy has a temple to confectionery in her bedroom, Mum. Mandy is a nutritionist's nightmare. Mandy is dental caries.
Of course, we said nothing and sidled out, followed by Mandy, who gave us a sly, opaque look, and wiggled her fingertips at the adults in her version of a goodbye wave.
Outside the sweet shop, the mica glittered in the pavement. We stopped to read the dirty postcards on display, hoping to prolong the moments while we were still in possession of our pocket money. Mandy rammed the bubble gum machine, casting a look up through her lashes towards the open shop door. 'This ain't much good,' she said. We went inside. We chose the cheapest things – penny chews, red liquorice bootlaces, translucent purple lollipops, gob-stoppers that left your tongue ripped and raw – all so that we could control the sharing out, handing over as little as possible to Mandy. She stood back, empty-handed, in her pocketless pink shift-dress, waiting to be given.
Back on the pavement, the sky was pewter and there was a roaring noise in the clouds, maybe an aeroplane with engine trouble, maybe thunder. Mandy gave the bubble gum machine a final vicious smack on its top and a single egg-yolk-yellow gumball dropped out. We walked home, not speaking.
Down our road came a four-legged hunchback on a bicycle. A low screaming sound issued out of it. It was Mattie, on the back of their old silver-painted bike, with Tom pedalling and steering. They shot past us, Mattie's arms stretched out wide. They must have veered round the roundabout, which was thankfully quiet at mid-afternoon, and came back, following a serpentine path, swinging from side to side on the sandy tarmac of our road. Swerving a violent ninety degrees, they disappeared through the gateway and were enveloped by the hedge.
'Who's that?' Mandy asked. Brian looked vague, as blank and invisible as Mandy herself when the chores were being given out. 'You must know them, they went in right next door to you.' She turned back to me, accusing. I shrugged.
The hunchback appeared again, tearing out through the hedge, clearing the pavement airborne, and landing with a yell. This time its back half was starfish-shaped, legs sticking out at an angle, arms held up in the air. I recognized Barbara's brown sandals, her tanned and scratched legs. Tom, hunched over the handlebars, pedalled madly. They screamed in unison, a pair of unmatched threadlike piercing squeals, as they passed us. Brian clapped his hands over his ears. They seemed to be doing it for us, or at us, this reckless display. They're claiming me, I thought. Or maybe they're just teasing me. It was impossible to tell.
Mandy turned, walked backwards for a couple of paces, following them with her narrowed eyes, still licking at her lollipop, the insides of her lips stained blue. Before she turned around again she gave me one quick flicking glance, just the way a snake's tongue darts out and in; and I knew that whatever Brian failed to see or failed to remark on, Mandy had spotted in a second.
After that, it was as if the rest of the Hennessys suddenly became visible. Their magic cloak had been lifted. I quite often saw one or another of them going up and down our road. The Van Hoogs' insect-like car crawling along, with Mr Van Hoog, who could hardly see over the steering wheel, peering anxiously ahead, his hands on the wheel like two mouse paws. Or Patrick's van pulling away, evil-smelling smoke belching from the exhaust. He drove a van because it was better suited than a car to transporting the large canvases and other pieces of equipment he used. The art school he taught at was in another, bigger town, inland. He turned off at the rou
ndabout and roared up the open road with his rude black smoke pouring out behind, like Mr Toad, keen to get away. Once I even spotted Tillie riding her upright ladies' bicycle with the basket on the front, pedalling stolidly along on her way back from the shops.
I never hailed them in the street. I was shy of presuming too much. And the Hennessys, being Hennessys, didn't appear to see me.
Although that's what it's like, being suburban. You think about whether you are going to greet people. Will greeting them get you in deeper, deeper than you are prepared to go? Will ignoring them, and maybe pretending to have something in your eye, let you off the hook, or will it cause offence? You're always weighing up and balancing these tiny social commitments. You fear to get sucked in.
With the Hennessys, though, I was prepared to go as deep as I could. Deeper than I could see, or breathe.
15
Observation Skills
'You're a good observer,' Lorna said to me this morning. 'You're observant, and you've got a good mind.'
Oh, thank you, Lorna. Thank you! How kind of you to let me know.
Well, Lorna, here's what I observe.
You are plain, and short. I hate short people. You sit with your little legs tucked neatly beneath your skirt, calves together, as I imagine you've done since schooldays. You wear ginger lace-up Hush Puppies, in a broad fitting. They still crease up over the widest part of your foot. I would say you have corns. Working upwards from the feet: your tights are cream, always the same shade. Do you buy them in bulk? Never take a chance on Chocolate, or Bermuda Beige? You wear, every time I see you, either a black skirt or one in light and dark brown tartan against some intermediate shade that I'm not even interested in finding a name for. You smooth down your skirt when you sit, and again when you stand. You wear a beige twinset, or a yellow jumper with lacy panels down the front which reveal layers of underwear. If you're going to go for teasing lacy panels, what's the point of a petticoat and a huge bra and maybe even something else underneath? The bra is one of those ones that come up to the armpits, and the tops of the cups almost up to the shoulders. I know, it's the sort Bettina had to resort to, to hold everything in and up. Sometimes I can see a gold locket round your neck; sometimes it must be tucked inside. You wear no rings, not even a fleshy diamond like Rose in Activity. Your complexion is pale and puffy. You favour just a dab of green eyeshadow, and lip-coloured lipstick. Your hair is coarse, with so many grey hairs in it that it's turning from black to pinstriped. You have a pony's fringe and two heavy wings of hair to your chin. It makes you look terrible. Yet you take such great care of your hair. It's always immaculately cut and immaculately combed, this great thick Cleopatra's wig of a hairstyle. Whatever for? It doesn't suit you at all. And I do know what I'm talking about. Don't forget, I am related to a second stylist.
Living In Perhaps Page 9
