Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  Only I never told you that, did I?

  Oh, and you always smell of some faint, sweet, cloying scent. Some man, years ago, must have said, 'Oh, Lorna, what a lovely perfume,' and you believed him. You didn't think he was just passing the time, or flattering you to get you to do something he couldn't be bothered to do himself, in the domestic or the bureaucratic field. You always wear that scent. My scent, you probably think, as you dab the stopper behind your ears and on your wrists, and you glance to see how low the bottle's getting.

  See, aren't I a careful observer? Mind like a razor, too.

  The gardens here are very neat. Big bland lawns, long straight flower beds, filled with all the same thing – butter-coloured tulips or sky-blue forget-me-nots – as if someone had taken a single colour and poured it out into a paint tray. Along the front of the building, which is white, lies a bandage of blood-red tulips.

  Maybe it's to help the gardeners concentrate their minds. They don't look all there, to me.

  The Hennessys' garden was a total mess. Mr Van Hoog, freed from straight nursery rows once he was retired, liked to throw the plants in all together, letting them fight it out. The front garden was heady with lavender and sprawling roses whose long stems were bent back down to the earth in thorny hoops. There were leaves mottled and splashed as though paint had been thrown at them, and flowers shaped like snapdragons, although I could see that they weren't just simple antirrhinums. Tom told me their names once and I thought I would remember them because it was him that told me. But I was bewitched by the shape of his mouth as he pronounced the unfamiliar words, and barely registered the names of the flowers.

  In the back garden, the children ruled the space. There was lawn to the side and the back of the house, an overgrown shrubbery (which was what I had crawled through when I breached the hedge), the old tennis court, and finally the orchard and vegetable patch. Mr Van Hoog wasn't interested in grass and let it grow any old how, so long as someone occasionally cut it. The pitted lawn was full of moles. The little boys liked to creep up and jump on the molehills, as if they stood a chance of crushing the mole skulls just beneath. But Mr Van Hoog would wave them off and come hurrying over with his trowel to scoop up the mole-heap spoil, which made excellent potting compost, so Barbara told me.

  There was a field that ran down the far side of the back garden, a bitten-down field, more brown than green. A donkey lived in it, and a sunk-backed pony like a settee with the springs gone. They belonged to a Mr Jenkins, a squat little man just as unkempt and stout and bandy as his animals. He kept them for his grandchildren to ride and every so often would come with a couple of halters and lead the two creatures away.

  'Why don't you ask if you can ride them?' I said to Barbara.

  'Wouldn't want to,' she replied, carelessly. 'They're vicious. They bite.' And to prove it she shot out a hand over the fence towards the pony's neck. It pressed its ears back and showed us long, yellow, wicked-looking teeth. But sometimes I spotted the others feeding them. I saw the little boys rip up handfuls of lush garden grass and hold them, palms flat, under the animals' noses. Without painful results. And I remembered reading somewhere – was it in A Pony for Patricia? – that you should never go to pat a horse behind its line of sight; they couldn't see what was going on and it made them anxious. So what was Barbara trying to prove?

  The Hennessys' garden was a paradise of disorder. You could look out on to the field and the trees, and the big hedge blocked all view of the road and the rest of the houses. Not a post-and-link fence or a garden gnome or a bungalow in sight. Which was exactly how they liked it.

  Sometimes I walk with Hanny in the gardens here. It's usually sunny, but the wind's still cold. She wears a burgundy velvet dress with bell-shaped sleeves to hide her knobbly wrists, and a hooded coat made out of tapestry material. The tip of the hood has a long silky tassel, in dirty gold, just like something you might find in a church. She looks like a vampire, but still she makes me feel my clothes are wrong, and dull.

  I have an Aran sweater, and a pair of jeans worn milky-white at the creases. I wear boots, or a pair of dirty tennis shoes. I thought I had just got them to the perfect pitch of dirtiness, but now I'm not so sure. I only wear the sweater when I go outside. Inside they always have the heating on and it's so hot and stuffy. Makes you feel quite ill. It's April now and I wonder if they are ever going to turn the heating off. You need to get out into the gardens to be able to breathe properly.

  I don't wear any make-up. I never have. It has always looked stupid on me, making my face seem like a mask, like a painted-up doll. And, anyway, I don't like all those handy-sized pots and tubes, the way they're displayed in shops like penny sweets, pick 'n' mix. Too handy-sized. Take one – what's gone? – very hard to spot the missing item. Just like Kim's game. I was very good at Kim's game when I was a Brownie. Always could spot what had gone missing.

  Some days Hanny wears thick black gook on her long black lashes. I don't know why she bothers, it just makes her look as if she's blinked into blackcurrant jam. But there are people who can hardly step out of bed without their make-up. They feel naked without it. They feel humiliated if people catch them with just their own faces on.

  I showed the magazine quiz to Hanny yesterday. We had a good laugh about it.

  Question ten: 'When choosing a birthday present for your best friend, would you (a) Shop for hours then end up buying something you'd really like yourself ? (b) Grab some chocs or flowers at the last minute? (c) Buy her something practical you know she needs? or (d) Give her a special home-made gift?'

  'Chocs,' said Hanny. 'Bloody hell. Chocs!'

  All the answers presuppose that the reader is someone with loads of time and money, and overflowing with vague but loving thoughts. A kind of empty goodwill.

  Hanny suggested, 'Maybe the quiz is called "Are you a Dippy Hippie or a Hard-faced Bitch?"'

  Where are the real-life alternatives?

  (a) You and your friend never exchange gifts.

  (b) You pretend, convincingly, that you didn't know it was her birthday.

  (c) You steal something.

  (d) You don't have a best friend.

  That first time when Hanny asked me my name, I paused and then said, 'Coral.' That was a new one, wasn't it?

  16

  A Family Likeness

  When I was about ten I started to grow really fast. I began to shoot up, as they always put it. Like some plant getting thin and leggy for want of light and outgrowing its space. My mother was tall. I said, 'I must take after Mum,' when one of the aunts commented on my height. And then, because I saw Gloria give me a quick, dazed look – a hurt sort of look, or so I thought – I added, 'But I've got Dad's eyes.' It was true, I had wide-set eyes like Dad and Gloria and Stella, the chilly blue of roughened water.

  So I knew I was lying when I told Barbara, 'I'm an orphan. I'm adopted. I'm not really their child.' I did it because I didn't want to seem suburban.

  'Are you? Are you really?' said Barbara. 'I've never met anyone who's adopted before.' And for the first time in ages she looked at me with a gleam of real interest in her eye. 'Why?'

  'Why what?'

  'Why were you adopted?'

  'I don't know!' I said indignantly. I hadn't got this far in my thinking. I was only just beginning to appreciate what a dangerous field I had strayed into. Of course, on the one hand, I kind of thought I was adopted, wished I was, believed that somehow I deserved something better than the family I had. But, on the other hand, my rational self knew it was inevitable that I hadn't been, that the genetic make-up I saw all around me at breakfast, and particularly at tea-time on those Sunday visits, was, of course, my destiny and my doom.

  'Who are your real parents, then?' Barbara asked.

  'I don't know. How should I know? I was adopted at birth,' I said firmly. And I had a vision of the moment, some poor labouring woman lying back on a bed and a newborn baby, me, neatly trussed in snow-white sheets, being passed into the eager hands of
my waiting parents. I hadn't a clue back then what really happened in childbirth. All I knew about was Little Lord Jesus and his swaddling bands. Funnily enough, the woman on the bed looked a bit like I used to imagine a Carolyn sort of mother would look, with her long fair hair all loose and her pretty face scrubbed of make-up.

  I couldn't see any likeness to Tillie in Mr and Mrs Van Hoog. I found them both repellent, and alarming. Maybe she had their light-coloured eyes, but what else was there? She was bird-boned and her face had a sculpted look. They were both short and fat. I hate short people. I hate fat people.

  We didn't have grandparents in my family – Brian and I had none, Mandy had none – so I had no idea what to expect of them. I didn't know how to behave around them, so I dodged into the shadows and hung back.

  Mr Van Hoog seemed to have taken on the role of an irascible park-keeper and treated the children like a pack of delinquents who haunted and teased him at his work. 'Get out! Get out of it!' he would cry, in his funny accent, and he'd growl and shake the tines of his fork at them, or pretend to sweep them out of the way with his broom. But they just rose to his challenge, loving it, waiting till he was looking their way and then jumping on the newly raked earth of his flower beds. When his back was turned they would steal his tools and hide them under bushes, or empty the watering can he had just filled. And then run away, laughing. With Isolde it was different. She was never naughty. So he called Isolde 'my princess', and ushered her round with an elaborate courtly air.

  Outdoors, he was usually busy in the garden. Sometimes he would take a break and sit on his side of the veranda and smoke a pipe. But sometimes I followed Barbara indoors to look for her grandmother, into those quiet rooms where the sunlight had to lever itself at a steep angle over the hedge. And then we might come across him, sitting absolutely still and silent in a chair, his hands on the arms, his eyes open. Barbara didn't hesitate to perch on the arm of his chair and peck him on the cheek. I couldn't believe she would do this. It was as repellent as kissing a corpse in a coffin. He might very well be dead. He looked dead to me, or comatose at the very least, sitting there, unmoving, not dozing or reading or smoking his pipe. I don't know why he sat there like that. When I asked, Barbara would say, 'Oh, it's OK, he's just thinking.' Which really didn't explain it.

  I was glad I didn't have a grandfather.

  Barbara's grandmother liked to do embarrassing things. Once Tillie was sitting on the steps with Mattie between her knees, singing in her high and rather untuneful voice: 'All the ducks are swimming in the water, Fa-la la-la li-lo, fa-la la-la li-lo ...' And when she stopped Mrs Van Hoog clapped her hands together, just like someone in the audience at a concert, as if Tillie had done something special. But all she was doing was singing a nursery rhyme, rather badly at that.

  Mrs Van Hoog always had to be patting and pulling at the children, praising and complimenting them, squeezing them for kisses. She was the one, not Tillie, who smoothed down Barbara's hair, tucked in her blouse, or cried, 'Give me that skirt – it needs an iron,' or 'Just let me catch up that hem,' to which Barbara always replied by darting away. Oma responded to defiance by chuckling with laughter, like a mad old witch who couldn't tell good from bad. She loved to feed her grandchildren sweets and peel apples for them, carve slices like petals and post them into their mouths. And they'd just gape like baby birds and let it happen.

  Barbara and the little boys willingly put up with all this, but with the older ones she had to be more circumspect. Tom just sloped away out of reach, slithering from her grasp, and she dared not offend Isolde's imperial dignity by poking and pressing her. She treated Isolde like a gracious, timid animal, a rare species of deer, who might be enticed into the open if only we were all still enough, quiet enough, beguiling enough. She offered food by holding the plate high, temptingly: 'Izzy, come try these? I made them for you.' And then, of course, all the starching and ironing and fine sewing appealed to Isolde's sense of propriety, and she was willing to allow Oma the privilege of looking after her clothes. She would stand waiting impatiently, with no air of gratitude, while Oma sank the point of her iron into the folds of a gathered sleeve. I had even seen Isolde sit while Oma slid one polished shoe after the other on to her feet, like the assistant in the children's department at Clark's. To the two of them, grandfather and grandmother, Isolde was a combination of the Sun King and a fairy princess. It was useful to me to see that even the Hennessy children weren't all equal; how one child could be treated completely differently from the others, not because she was special, but for the simple reason that she thought she was special. Maybe this was Mandy's secret weapon.

  I don't know what Brian's was. Yes, I do. He was a boy.

  It seems to me that this is one of the major things you learn in childhood: that not all families are like your family. You start out thinking that the way it happens round your tea table is the template for the universe. What else could there be? Gradually, by exposure, you get to learn some very strange things: that some people have parsley sauce with their fish, not everyone heats the milk for the coffee, and the father of the family may belch in public and even then fail to be censured by an embarrassed wife. The father taps his sternum, the wife carries on knitting, the coffee sits lukewarm in the cups. How extremely weird. And then you begin to wonder – is belching and cold coffee and parsley sauce the normal thing? What is the normal thing? Knitting and silence? Bickering and manners? Maybe it's a lifetime's work to sort it all out.

  All I know is, at the time, I was frightened of Barbara's grandparents. Not because what they did was necessarily frightening at all, but just because it was unknown, strange. I was afraid that Mr Van Hoog would growl at me, or even worse, that Mrs Van Hoog would wrap me in a hot embrace and force a segment of orange between my lips. They revolted me – their bodies, their clothes, their habits. Even the way Barbara's grandmother turned an apple under her knife with dizzying speed was foreign to me. We did not peel apples by that method in my circle.

  I needn't have worried. They never did do anything unwarranted to me. It was as if they couldn't even see me. I was under a spell, enchanted. I could wander about, unhindered, like a little ghost.

  Lorna asks, 'What did they tell you about the adoption? I mean, your mother and father.'

  'My adopted mother and father?' I'm a stickler, but polite with it. I'm always polite to Lorna. My mother would be proud of me. I think the politeness is driving Lorna up the wall. One can only hope.

  'Your adopted mother and father, yes.'

  I think about this. 'Not much,' I say. She pauses to make a little note.

  This is the worst thing, this making of little notes! Sometimes you say something that sounds as if it should be quite important, vital even, and she just sits there, hands unoccupied, and lets you go on. But say something stupid, or pointless, and there it goes, pen to paper, squiggle, squiggle, squiggle. What the hell is she writing? What the hell does she know?

  That's why you should never say anything. Make it up. Tell lies. Hanny agrees with me.

  'We're the only two sane people in this place, and I don't exclude the staff,' she said. 'We have to protect ourselves.'

  'That's all right, I'm an incorrigible liar,' I told her.

  'Incorrigible. I like that word.'

  'I've always been a liar. No, that's not true.' I tried to explain, but Hanny threw her head back and laughed silently, her throat quivering.

  'If you're like this in group sessions, you'd drive me mad,' she said, when she could speak again.

  'What I mean is that I started off small, just making excuses. Or being evasive.'

  'Everyone does that,' said Hanny.

  'But later on you need bigger excuses – proper lies – because you're up to bigger things. You've got more to cover up.'

  Hanny gave me her moody sideways glance, and hugged her knees. We were sitting on our usual bench, and she stuck out her chin and propped it on her bony kneecaps and began to look stubborn. 'What's all this?' she asked
, staring ahead of her. 'You're not working up to the big confession, are you? Because I can tell you straight off, I'm not interested in anything like that.'

  'No, I'm not.' I hoped I sounded indignant, but my voice came out all tight. I coughed to free it. 'I'm just giving you the benefit of my technique. If you want to hear it.'

  It was the first time I'd stood up to Hanny. I might run Lorna ragged and have fun in the process, but then she was the implacable opposition, not my friend.

  A beat of silence, a long, long beat. Then: 'OK, go on.'

  'What I find with lying,' I said, and leaned my head back against the wall: warming up now, relaxing. If there was one thing Hanny and I both enjoyed, it was theorizing. 'Successful lying, that is – it's keep it small. Keep it modest. Being a big, flash liar is like walking on a tightrope – too easy to slip off somewhere along the way. What I tend to find is that you don't have to give them much. Just the bare minimum will do. Don't pile it on unnecessarily, you'll only end up forgetting some of the things you've said. It's amazing what you don't have to say to get away with it.'