Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  They have a patients' lounge here which we are supposed to use for 'socializing'. Now there's a word. What image does it conjure up? Little groups in vibrant conversation, the clink of bone-china cups. Even – at a pinch – something fun and genteel, like a tea dance, or early evening cocktails. Greetings trilled across the room, a white hand waving and beckoning over the crowd. A ginsling for me, please, darling! Another rum punch over here! Perhaps that's just the sort of thing that went on in this big, elegant room once upon a time, before the whole place was transformed.

  The lounge is ringed with Scandinavian-modern chairs upholstered in bobbly tweed. To feel comfortable in one of these chairs you would need to be about seven foot tall, with no back problems and preferably no head, for the backrest reaches no higher than the shoulder blades. You would want abnormally long arms, but plump ones too, for the bare wooden armrests are hard on elbow and wrist bones. The chair cushions come in four colours: burnt orange, sludge green, brown and beige. Blue is still my favourite colour, I'm afraid, so no luck here. There are about twenty of these armchairs, plus some plastic stacker chairs placed around the walls. In the centre of the room is a circular coffee table which no one ever puts anything on. Not even coffee.

  There are no seven-foot-tall inmates with bloated arms. Only the usual happy crowd. I'd rather stay in my room, but they don't like it. They like you to come in here and socialize. I look around for Hanny, but she isn't here. She's never here. Perhaps she's got some activity or session or something on at this time of day. Perhaps there's a non-eaters' group which she has to attend. I don't know. She's never said.

  I choose an orange chair and slide into it. There's no choice but to slide, to slump, in these things. My mother would be horrified. And almost everyone fiddles with the upholstery, their fingers twitching along the arms searching for extra-large bobbles or loose threads to pull at. They're great ones for fiddling, twisting, turning, rubbing, scratching, scraping, here. I glance about and recognize Rose, and Marsupial, and the Young Crone. I recognize others, too, but they haven't got names. I can't be bothered to give them all names. Nobody ever introduces you, yet they'd really rather like it if we socialized.

  And here comes Mike, wheeling in the television. It's a big old-fashioned set in a wooden case, perched on top of a trolley, wheeled in and then wheeled out again. There are only certain programmes we're allowed to watch, at certain times. Nature programmes, and some regional thing about country crafts and willow warblers and restored water mills. Nice safe stuff, so they think. But have they ever watched these wildlife programmes? Don't they realize the precise nature of these fluffy creatures in their attractive rural settings? It certainly is a jungle out there, with big beasts jumping on smaller ones, the swift dragging down the slow, the halt, the lame, even – and especially – the cute little baby ones. Another poor wildebeest bites the dust. There always has to be someone at the back of the herd, one whose unlucky day it is. A family of lions chew under the stripy haunch of a zebra. Its leg bounces gamely in the savannah wind, almost as if it were still alive and kicking. Perhaps it is.

  Mike has left the room. Mike has popped out. Doesn't he know what's going on in here, what murder and mayhem? Nature red in tooth and claw, vividly imaginable even on black-and-white telly.

  The woman in the chair next to me is rocking back and forth. Her strawy hair hangs over her face. I keep catching sight of her out of the corner of my eye. The TV switches its attention to small venomous things, things which dart and dive and shoot and spring twenty times their own length, catapulting out extravagant tongues, injecting and hauling and engulfing their victims in lethal webs, turning the internal organs of their prey to liquid before slowly ingesting them. Good grief. The woman next to me has begun to make a noise, a low, rhythmic, keening noise. Whether it's to do with what's happening on the screen or what's happening inside her head is impossible to know. No one else seems to notice. They go on picking at the bobbly tweed of their seat cushions, examining their hands, gazing blankly at the television. Marsupial lets out one of her huge impatient sighs.

  Then it happens. My neighbour shrieks. You might almost think it is a macaw or a monkey, some background noise to the jungle warfare going on in front of our eyes, except for the volume. And how long it goes on for. She doesn't stop. She's grabbing the arms of her chair and swinging her body back and forth wildly, and screaming, screaming, at the top of her voice.

  Mike pops back in.

  Mike pops back in, looking like he's been shot, and dashes out again to summon help. Two assistants in white nylon – not the would-be friendly, civvies-clad likes of Moira or Trudy, this is the heavy mob – dive into position on either side of her chair, and the blonde woman is lifted bodily in the air. She shrieks again. The brief silence, the cessation between one scream and the next, is as ear-piercing as the noise itself. I slither round like an eel out of my chair and out of the way. I certainly don't want to be caught up in any of this. What on earth is she up to? Making an exhibition of herself ! And us.

  She flings herself sideways, out of their grasp, and as she hits the floor she starts banging her head, lifting it and banging it back down on the green carpet, as if her neck is a stalk and her head's a flower bobbing about in the breeze. But one of the assistants is kneeling astride her now and the other one gets her head, and between them they hold her still, and then something – something – happens. She goes limp. Mike hovers above them. They pick her up and carry her gently, like a sleeping baby, out of the room. Mike follows. Nobody else is looking. Everyone has turned their gaze aside, as if something unfortunate has taken place, and they are being polite enough not to notice. Some of them are looking at the television screen, where a coiffed blonde woman is smiling with all her many teeth and holding up a tube of Colgate toothpaste.

  It was just as if she had been shot with the venomous dart of a jungle insect, shot and rendered insensible almost before she knew it. I creep back to my chair. The lounge is very still, preternaturally still, just like the jungle in the moments after a kill.

  22

  Sleeping Out

  I'm almost fond of my room here. From up here on a fine day I can see endless blue, trackless wastes. My window looks over the back of the house and beyond the gardens to fields and woods. The view is prettier than any I've had before. I imagine it's the kind of view a Carolyn would have from her bedroom window. The fields are proper green, not bitten brown, and the woods are real woods – mixed deciduous, as they put it in geography lessons – with leafy trees in all different shapes and sizes. The hills are proper hills. In the evenings, out there is where the first star appears, before the sky has even lost its light. Sometimes, I lean on the window sill and – ignoring the room behind me which really doesn't fit the bill – I pretend I am Carolyn, just looking out, just gazing out on her garden and the countryside that surrounds her pretty house, and that in a minute or two I will go downstairs to supper with my lovely family.

  I'm not bored here. Not really. I've always been used to waiting around for things to happen, things that don't usually bother to happen, anyway, in the end. I wonder if that's what they mean by low expectations. I've not had that much history, and mostly I've been the person drifting round the edges of the picture, looking on, not the one in the middle, doing whatever it is that the picture's about. And I've lost the first five years of my life, and there's a few months recently I've chosen to lose. Perhaps it is all entirely voluntary. I think that's what Lorna believes, and that's why she feels that if I wanted to I could rattle it out like dice from a shaker. My mother, the children's home, being adopted. The recent stuff, too. Rattle it out and see what comes up.

  I can't imagine how Barbara would survive in here. With her, boredom is almost a disease, certainly a condition bordering on the chronic. She'd go stir-crazy by the end of the first day. They would have to use all those marvellous methods they try to keep in reserve, syringes and restraints, that kind of thing. What I witnessed in the patients'
lounge. And you see it happening, sometimes, at the end of a corridor, or through an open bedroom door. We're always hustled away, hurried past, but I've got a good idea of what goes on. What goes on with poor deranged creatures like Rose, or the woman with blonde hair who wrings her hands. They'd have something up their sleeve for the likes of Barbara.

  I would rather not go down to the patients' lounge any more. I would be quite happy to stay here and just watch the sky for hours; which, of course, is not approved of. But it's a bloody sight better than having to mix with loonies.

  In a torpid spell of hot weather one July, Barbara and I hatched a plan. We were what – eleven? Twelve?

  I worked it all out in advance. I said to my mother, 'I've been asked to stay over at a friend's house. To sleep the night. Suzannah Grey's.'

  'Oh yes?' For once she sounded sceptical. 'Where does she live?'

  Brian gave me a look, and I looked blandly back. 'Fairwith Avenue.' I named a road I knew would impress. I'd done my research.

  'What number?'

  'Fifteen. It has a white door.'

  'A white door?'

  'A white front door.'

  Unfortunately she consulted with my father. This was a new development, conferring about my welfare. 'Dad will pick you up tomorrow morning. At nine o'clock. You don't want to impose on people.'

  So after tea I took my overnight things in a duffel bag and set out, walking steadily as far as the roundabout, then taking the road out of town, past the café, doubling back through the rough ground beyond the houses and ending up in the pony's field that adjoined the Hennessys' back garden. Barbara was standing by the fence, watching Mattie feed the pony and the donkey with carrot tops.

  'What took you so long?'

  'Deceiving my elders.'

  The plan was to sleep out on the veranda. Barbara said they'd often done it, when the weather was hot. She was always surprising me with things like that, things I was no part of, had no inkling about. I'd be feeling fine and dandy, in the swing of things, and then – wham! – by the way, here's something you didn't know, Carol, what fun we had when you weren't here. I could never make up my mind whether she kept such things from me deliberately, or whether she just forgot to mention them. God knows, there's plenty of information that people choose to keep to themselves. Just think of my family. Think of me.

  On the Hennessys' veranda they had an old swing-chair with faded canvas cushions. I perched on it, my legs dangling, and watched while Barbara dragged a camp bed and a mattress across the boards. Down the garden I could see Tom unhooking the hammock. Tillie had bought it earlier that summer and hung it between the stoutest pair of apple trees. He carried it towards us over the lawn and tied it up to two of the veranda posts.

  'Where's Tom Rose?' Barbara asked.

  Tom shrugged. 'Gone home.'

  'Good. We don't want him as well.'

  'I'm having the hammock,' Tom said. 'Hands off. Touch it at your peril.'

  I hadn't known that Tom was in the plan. I had thought it was just Barbara and me. Possibly Isolde, if she felt like it; maybe the little boys, too, if their mother said yes, and if they didn't drive Barbara mad with their whispering and noises. But in the end it turned out to be just Barbara and Tom and me.

  Barbara went indoors for supplies, and came back with honey sandwiches, a KitKat and two hard green apples, which we added to the chewing gum and cupcakes stolen from the kitchen cupboard that I had brought. We sat on the boards of the veranda with our bare legs stretched out, feeling the daytime's heat coming up out of the wood, and talking in low voices.

  The little boys and Tom and Patrick had gone far away down the lawn, playing some wild game that involved cricket bats and screaming and not too much else. I thought of my parents, beyond the hedge. They were probably indoors. My mother disliked the gnats that hung in clouds in the summer air. Perhaps they had the wireless on. Perhaps one of them leaned forward and pointedly turned up the volume, and gave the other a look that spoke volumes, too.

  Then the boards creaked as Tillie walked down the steps and over the dimming grass, clapping her hands and calling for the boys to come in. But she must have given up trying, or got sucked into the game, for we heard her shrieks added to theirs.

  'You can sleep on the swing-seat,' Barbara said, which I thought was very generous of her until I discovered just how hard the cushions were, sloping at an angle that made you roll towards the back. She set about making her camp bed into a comfortable nest. Tillie came back to the house, followed by the little boys. We could hear their feet going upstairs, doors opening and closing, pipes thumping, cisterns flushing, dishes and cutlery clashing in the kitchen as Tillie washed up. The garden was getting darker with a kind of floating dusk. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted round to us, and Tillie and her mother's voices talking quietly, in Dutch, I supposed, because I couldn't understand it. Barbara sat on her camp bed, pummelling her pillow. 'Something's biting me,' she complained.

  I had so looked forward to this. I had looked forward to the long luxurious hours of being at their house, of being able to laugh and to talk – endlessly – what about I didn't know, but I knew it would end up being about something important. Countless hours given up to conversation would have to lead to that. In the past, I'd always had to go back home, long before I wanted to. I had never stayed overnight with a friend before. I had never slept outside.

  Then Tom came bounding up, shaking the boards of the veranda. The smell of sweat came off him. The smell of hot flesh, of rolled-on grass. 'Aha! The trusty hammock,' he said. He climbed in, fell out, swore, tied it up tighter. He stamped off, came back with a bottle of water, half of which he drank, then poured the remaining half noisily over his head. Splashes of it fell on us.

  'What have you got, then?' He crouched down, inspecting our supplies, which Barbara had put into a biscuit tin and pushed under her camp bed. 'They're ours,' she said. 'Get off them!'

  He picked up a cupcake.

  'Get your own,' Barbara told him.

  He opened his mouth and pushed half of it in, then seeing we were still watching, he slowly pushed the rest in with a delicate forefinger. His lips closed over the cake. When he opened them again on a smile made entirely of crumbs and icing, Barbara screamed.

  I was afraid that this was how it would be. Tom showing off boys' tricks, bullying us just with the force of his presence, not allowing us to have those long hours of private conversation. But then Tillie came out. She walked round the side of the house carefully on bare feet, carrying a tray of little cakes. 'Oma made these, for the campers-out.' (Oma was not her Christian name but what Dutch children called their grandmas, I had found out. I still avoided her. Too fat, too strange. Too wildly loving.) Tillie set the tray down carefully on the boards, then crouched down too, placing her pale square feet side by side, then sat, swinging her legs down over the edge of the veranda. She picked up a cake and ate it. Tom calmed down at once, became just another one of us, reaching a long gorilla's arm out of his hammock to pick up a cake. And bite into it like a normal person, and chew and swallow.

  'Can you smell Grandpa's roses?' Tillie said, and we could, because she'd suggested it. We tried to identify the flowers we could smell on the warm evening air, and the sounds of the birds settling down for the night. If I had been transported to Brazil or India it could not have seemed further away. I couldn't believe that my own house was only next door, was just a matter of yards away, beyond the bulk of the Hennessys' house and the hedge. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in an Arabian nights' palace, lying on plump cushions, eating unfamiliar little cakes, breathing in the exotic scent of roses. Tillie had gone away but came back again with a glass and her tobacco tin. She set it down beside her and started to roll one of her thin, uneven cigarettes. 'Get under your covers now to keep warm,' she said to us. The blanket I had smelled of the Hennessys' house. I breathed it in as if I was drowning.

  We could hear Isolde's voice high up indoors. I didn't know who she was t
alking to, no one could be heard answering back. Then Patrick appeared across the garden, which was by now all one uniform grey.

  'I'll be off out in a minute,' he said. 'I was going to say was there anything I could fetch you, but you look well provided for.' And he nodded at Tillie's drink, her cigarettes, her plate of cakes, her bare toes pulled up on the edge of the veranda. He put a hand on Barbara's side, through the blankets, and patted her. 'Sleep well, my beauty, and mind the bugs don't bite. But I'm sure they will.' He did the same to Tom, setting the hammock swinging. To me he said and did nothing, he looked tactfully across me as though I was nothing but air.

  When he had gone Tillie stirred, swilling the ice round in her glass. She stretched her feet down from the veranda, and jumped lightly into the grass. 'Oh, well now,' she said. 'Hmm.'

  'Mu-um?' said Barbara (who almost never called her that). But Tillie didn't reply. She just sighed. We watched her walk off into the dark.

  Tom reached out a hand and lifted her glass, draining the last drops and the slivers of ice. Then he knocked her tobacco tin with the tips of his fingers, until it had slid into the shadows beneath Barbara's bed. We lay in the stillness, listening to the quiet. A sudden cough and snort nearby made Barbara cry, 'God, what's that!?' but Tom said, sounding sleepy, 'Only that horse over the fence,' and Barbara sighed, turning in her blankets, and said, 'Oh yes, the horse.'

  I thought we were all going to go to sleep then, though by my watch – if I stretched my arm out and screwed it round into a shaft of light coming from inside the house, I could just about see – it was only half past ten. I was disappointed, I'd thought we would stay awake till well after midnight, would climb out to look at the stars. I became aware of how hard my bed was, how sloping, how prickly the blanket. My eyes strained open. My muscles were taut and my bones had begun to ache. I tried a yawn to see if I was at all sleepy – it felt unconvincing. Tom actually let out a snore. Then Barbara giggled. And sat up. Tom snored some more. Barbara leaned across and whacked him. The hammock vibrated, then Tom slowly, slowly, as if in a dream, slumped out of one end of it and slithered to the floor. He lay absolutely still. Barbara sat, unmoving. I leaned up on my elbow. Tom still had not moved. A last bit of his blanket unwound itself from the hammock and we heard the clunk as his skull dropped an inch or two on to the hard wood of the floorboards. 'Ow-how!' he said, sounding perfectly conscious, and we all let out a laugh. I was enchanted.