Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  When it was the four of us, I found that they preferred the shops that sold stationery and cosmetics. We'd wander round the counters, picking up erasers and pencil sharpeners and putting them down again, looking at the wrapping paper and the cards, trying out lipstick testers on the backs of our hands, spraying on sample scents. Barbara and Gaynor and Jillian weren't at all bothered by the penetrating looks of the salesladies in the department stores, but even so they chose to go to Woolworth's or the smaller shops, like Dorothy Perkins, where the staff were often Saturday girls, not much older than us.

  One of us might buy a pair of tights, or a hairslide, or some decorated paper to cover a school textbook, but the rest would come home empty-handed, except for a few sweets. We always bought sweets. We became fiends for chocolate bars and caramel, for Polo mints, for gum. There was always something sweet or minty in our pockets, in our school bags. We had turned into Mandy.

  In Barbara's bedroom, a dark little room on the ground floor, she had fixed up a tilting mirror and a desk lamp on top of the chest of drawers. We directed the lamp on to our faces and peered into the mirror. I drew my hair back, Barbara piled hers up. We made gargoyle faces, we simpered like film stars. In the end we drooped our mouths and came to the conclusion that we would always be ugly. Barbara kept a few lipsticks, Cover Girl and Yardley, in the top drawer of the chest. We tried them on – Sugar Candy, Frosted Plum, Café-au-Lait. One was a dark red. It left a stain even after I had rubbed my mouth with my hankie. 'God, why did you buy this one?' I asked.

  'Oh, I didn't,' she said, absorbed in smearing pink blusher over her cheekbones.

  'Is it one of Tillie's?' I said, thinking of that time she and Patrick had gone out all dressed up, the crimson frock and the deep red lipstick.

  'Nah,' said Barbara, pulling a face. 'That's from one of our shopping expeditions.'

  Which seemed like a contradiction to me. She was drawing a wobbly uptilted tail of eyeliner, the muscles of her forehead tense with concentration. She saw my expression in the mirror. 'It's nicked,' she said, and gave me a bored glance so that I didn't dare overreact. Then she licked the tip of her eyeliner brush and started on the other eye.

  In Woolworth's, with Gaynor and Jillian up ahead, and Barbara clamping my upper arm, we strolled over to the stationery counter. Barbara stopped to examine the writing paper, so I stopped too. I had no choice. Barbara gazed critically at blue lined, at plain white, at airmail and onion-skin. None of them seemed up to the purpose she had in mind. The Saturday girl watched her.

  'Do you have any plain cream writing paper?' Barbara enquired.

  The girl bent to look beneath the counter. 'I don't think ...'Her voice was muffled.

  Barbara pinched me fiercely. My hand drifted across the counter top, hung there motionless like someone levitating, in the control of the spirits. The girl straightened up again. Barbara pinched me even harder.

  'Isn't this it?' I asked, my voice surprising me with its innocence.

  'No, that's lined,' the girl said, lifting up the pad my hand was wavering over.

  'Oh well, thanks anyway,' said Barbara, and shuffled me away. 'Small,' she hissed. 'Something really small.'

  In Boots the Chemist, we dithered by miniature tubes of sty ointment, throat pastels, tiny packets of plasters. We sniffed the cakes of soap. We brushed our fingertips over the jars of lip balm. My legs had turned to jelly.

  It was cold outside and the wind off the sea whipped up the side streets and flayed our skin. We halted on the street corner, shivering.

  Gaynor, who had tooth braces and a long face that reminded me of a horse, rounded on me. 'You just can't do it, can you?'

  Jillian, tiny and blonde and angelic, the sort of person no adult would ever seek to pin the blame on, said, 'You look so bloody guilty you'll get us all in trouble. And we won't have even done anything!'

  Another weekend came round, and I called on Barbara. 'I'm going out,' she said. I didn't have the nerve to ask her if I could come too. I just didn't have the nerve.

  I went into training. I stiffened my resolve. I practised my skills.

  I went round and showed her, pulling out my tiny haul from a deep coat pocket.

  One tester lipstick (only a stub left inside), one pencil eraser, one set of hair grips still on its card, one corn plaster, one bottle of clear nail varnish. I didn't say anything.

  She studied them. She hugged me. 'I didn't want to leave you out,' she said. 'Honestly.'

  I looked at her. I didn't know. With her green eyeshadow and her pearly pink lipstick on, you couldn't tell who she was any more. And I'd never known what she was really thinking.

  As summer came around, it seemed to me that more and more we left the other two out. Barbara seemed content to stay at home, with just me for company. We played endless games of tennis over their sagging net. We swung in the hammock, and used the embryonic apples and pears that hung in the trees for target practice. Or we lay in the gloom of Barbara's bedroom and listened to crackly pirate radio stations and read magazines. The boredom and torpor seemed half the pleasure.

  Barbara and I still went into town together, but not very often. Occasionally we lifted things, just to keep our hand in, but more often we didn't bother. It had been just a phase, a phase we'd largely grown out of. I thought that Gaynor and Jillian had fallen by the wayside. But then I discovered that Barbara was just as friendly with them as ever. As thick as thieves, I believe the expression is.

  Jillian had perfected the bag trick. She was eager to show it off. We went clothes-shopping. We bought things and took them back for a refund, but saved every receipt, and wandered thoughtfully round the display rails, pretending to turn up our noses at what was on offer. We'd amassed a collection of carrier bags from every shop in town, fresh, new-looking ones, and put them to good use when the assistants weren't looking. My arms and legs felt weak again, as if the very bones and sinews had deserted me. Barbara appeared in a new green skinny-rib top, never paid for. Gaynor had got a chiffon scarf, and a necklace. But Jillian was the queen: she had a leather belt, a T-shirt, a short pleated skirt and a top like Barbara's, only in red.

  'Doesn't the thought of getting caught at this ever worry you?' I asked once, foolishly, when we were walking along the seafront, eating chips, a carrier bag of stolen goods swinging jauntily from Jillian's arm. 'Surely the nuns tell you this kind of thing is wrong?'

  Gaynor snorted. 'They tell us everything is wrong. Breathing is wrong.'

  'Yeah, if you stick out your chest when you do it!' Barbara added, and they all went into gales of laughter.

  'It's a sin, it's a sin,' Jillian said. She was obviously mimicking someone they all knew. Barbara leaned heavily on my shoulder, laughing right into my ear.

  'It is a sin,' I said, and they stared at me and started laughing all over again.

  But nobody did catch us. We were invincible. We carried out secret raids and escaped with our spoils. Or so I thought at the time.

  I didn't want this kind of stuff. I really didn't want baby lipsticks, or round ponds of green or lilac powder with a mirror in the lid, reflecting one evil eye. I didn't want pencil sharpeners set in frogs' mouths or up pigs' bottoms, or pencils with tiny tassels, or rainbow-coloured erasers. The smell of those lemon-shaped soaps made me heave. I didn't want scarves and belts and tights – I knew if I ever wore them, they'd flash fluorescent signs that screamed 'Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!' to every passer-by. Especially those in the retail trade.

  I'm sure that Barbara and Gaynor and Jillian didn't really want them either. I'm sure they could have afforded to buy them, if that's what they really desired. It was the adventure that was the thing, the risk, the thrill, the pure distilled wickedness they wanted. And the one-upmanship: whoever was the latest to steal something was best, whoever's haul was biggest was boldest.

  This was how I fell out of love with Barbara. When we began our first forays into the world of petty crime I was desperate for her approval; by the time we'd finished I no long
er cared. I had other fish to fry. It wasn't girls I was trying to impress now, it was boys. One boy. Barbara and I were still friends, but we weren't best friends. We might have been blood brothers, but we never took the vow.

  'Let's see,' Lorna says, glancing at my file, which today is open on the table but too far away from me to be readable. I don't even let my eyes stray in its direction. That would be much too obvious, and I like to keep Lorna on the hop. Instead I fix my gaze on Lorna, on her face, and when she looks back up, I gaze deeply and innocently into her eyes. No one finds it easy to be on the receiving end of that for very long, surely? Not even someone trained in the therapeutic arts?

  She looks down again and says, 'Your mother wanted you to take piano lessons. She's musical herself. You say you played duets together.' She looks up. 'Did you enjoy your music lessons?'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you still play?'

  Given the lack of a milk-white baby grand in the patients' lounge, what can I say? 'I'd like to,' comes my seraphic answer.

  'But the lessons stopped. Can you recall when that was?'

  'When I was about thirteen, fourteen.'

  'Why was that?'

  'They cost too much. We were teenagers. Teenagers are expensive. They eat a lot and have big feet.'

  'I see.'

  I realized the conversation we were having was possibly the smoothest and most pleasant we had ever had. Lorna looked down again. There was something different about her today. She was wearing new lipstick, coral-coloured. Perhaps she was doing it for me. My name on her lips.

  'Did your mother put an end to the piano lessons when she found out you'd been shoplifting?' Lorna said, raising her head sharply, staring at me, shaking her pony fringe out of her eyes. 'As a punishment? Was that the reason?'

  Hang on a minute – which mother are we talking about here? Perhaps she's trying to trip me up. And my mum didn't find out about the shoplifting for ages, not until there was a whole lot more to know as well.

  I'm confused. I don't want to drop myself in it. I think I'll plead the fifth amendment.

  25

  Tom

  It wasn't a crush that I had on Tom. I loved him long and slow, bad and deep.

  Crushes are superficial, juvenile. You learn better, and grow out of them. If I had a crush on anyone, it was Isolde. I was daunted but impressed by her; wanted to look like her, to be her. She seemed so unbelievably adult, so composed, even when I first knew her. She had Patrick's hair, horse-brown and curly. She wore it long, often in a ponytail but sometimes gathered romantically up, like a girl on a Greek vase. Her pale, high-cheekboned face, with eyes that were just horizontal lines, narrowed and discriminating, was the pattern of beauty, to me. She persuaded me that she was truly special. But every time she glanced disdainfully round at her family, and sighed and said that the fairies must have swapped her at birth, I thought: how can you say that? How can you wish yourself out of a family like this?

  That's how it was with Isolde. But not with Tom.

  At first I hardly noticed him, he was just a big boy, lanky and harsh-voiced. Then, when I had sorted the Hennessys out from each other, and knew their names, he was the one I avoided. If there was one thing in the world I wasn't accustomed to it was big boys. I knew about little boys. And whiny little girls, and older girls, really – aunts and cousins and mothers all amounted to that, extensions of the female at all ages and stages. But big boys were strange and scary. Tom would swing round the corner of the hallway like a gorilla, one hand on the banisters, and lunge up the stairs, two or three at a time. Spurts of energy would propel him forward, or up, or down. Expulsions of laughter burst from his lungs. He and Tom Rose conversed with one another by shouting, like people coughing up blood – great gobbets and gouts of noise issued out of them, all of a sudden, stopping and starting again, racking their bodies as they ran and leaped about the house. I didn't know how Tillie could bear it.

  Nobody else in the house seemed to notice the horror of this.

  But then, I suppose, they'd been through Eugene.

  Eugene I never saw. Eugene was a figment of Hennessy imagination, a monkey baby in a painting, old enough now to make his own way in the world. Barbara said he was learning to be an architect. He lived somewhere called Parsons Green (I imagined an olde English village) with some people called Dill and Arthur. Arthur had been Patrick's best man at the wedding. Dill was his second wife, his first wife, Eloise, having run off with a boy of nineteen. Two thoughts crossed my mind: one – wasn't Arthur worried about the possibility that his second wife might run off with another boy of nineteen (or thereabouts, I didn't quite know Eugene's age)? And two – that I had absolutely no idea who was best man to my father, if he had one. How was it right that I should know more about the Hennessys than my own family?

  Barbara taught me a little rhyme. She would hop on and off the back steps, reciting it:

  Monday's child is fair of face,

  Tuesday's child is full of grace,

  Wednesday's child is full of woe,

  Thursday's child has far to go,

  Friday's child is loving and giving,

  Saturday's child works hard for a living.

  But the child that is born on the Sabbath Day

  Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

  'What day were you born on?' she asked me. I looked blank. It had never occurred to me that I must have been born on a particular day of the week. 'I was born on a Thursday,' she said happily. 'That means either I'll travel a lot, or have great achievements. Or both, probably. Izzy's Tuesday, Tom's Friday, Eugene and Mattie are both Mondays, and Sebastian is a Sunday's child.'

  I thought about that. It seemed fair enough to me.

  'What day was I born on?' I asked my mother, who gave me a blank look the equal of my own. 'What day of the week?' After a bit, she said, 'Wednesday.' Only later did I know that she must have been lying. Guessing.

  Guessing, lying, making it up: what's the diff ? We do it all the time.

  So, Tom.

  I can't really say what it was I loved about him. I can't go: let me count the ways. I always knew about his defects, and God knows he had enough. That's why it wasn't a crush or calf-love or any of those moony spoony patronizing names for adolescent heart-pangs. My love for him was always clear-eyed.

  First he was an alien, a noisy gorilla, it was only his curly fair hair that I found fascinating and attractive. Then, just as Barbara and I were growing apart, I realized that he'd become the fixed centre of that turning household on which my eye was always focused. I could look at his sticking-out Adam's apple, at his big clumsy feet, or the way his T-shirt hung off his shoulder blades, and not delude myself that these things were beautiful, but know I loved them. I dwelt on them with affection. He always was bullying and egotistical and full of some enormous chip-on-the-shoulder rage to which I'm sure he wasn't entitled. But I didn't mind. I loved him. The fact that I could bear these things made me feel proud.

  Then, at times, he could be loving, could be suddenly, strikingly gentle – with an insect, or one of his brothers, or me – in a way that made my heart stop. And he was always candid, and amusing, and inhabited his body, his long bony body, like an animal, perfectly at home with itself and with the physical world. He could happily lie down to watch television on double beds beside (almost) complete strangers. He could fall asleep at the table in the middle of a noisy kitchen. He could climb up the posts of the veranda and swing in feet-first through his bedroom window, and if you asked why, he might say, 'I didn't feel like taking the stairs.'

  Of course all this was attractive to a girl of limited experience, limited physical experience (the physical means at my disposal being one ever-tidy bungalow, one bolted bathroom door, one family sure as eggs is eggs that God gave us our bodies in order for us to walk to church, and to cover them decently, and never use them to draw attention to ourselves). Of course Tom's physical presence was highly seductive. I succumbed. Of course I did. As sure as eggs
is eggs.

  Tom's friend Tom Rose was always about. Even more than me he inhabited the house like one of its rightful occupants. He ate meals with them, which I did not – or almost never – and he often stayed the night on Tom's bedroom floor. We always had to call him Tom Rose to differentiate; never Tom Hennessy and Tom Rose, just Tom and Tom Rose. He was tall, too, but wide-shouldered, with a nose about to become a beak; mean-eyed and unlovely, to my way of thinking. He was an appendage of Tom's, a shadow, a sniggering partner, a recipient of sideways looks, digs in the ribs. 'He lives with his mother, his dad died at sea,' Barbara had told me once. 'And he doesn't get on with his mum's new boyfriend.' (I wondered what she told anyone about me, in those sharp, potted histories she always had available, like the Dictionary of National Biography.) And why did this make Tom Rose ever welcome, and why did it make him not suburban? Almost the first I knew of liking Tom was knowing that I didn't like Tom Rose. In fact, I was horribly jealous of him.

  We were in Tom's bedroom. We always seemed to be in his bedroom these days. As adolescents we needed the music, we needed the ambience of posters and joss sticks and old socks, and beds and floor cushions to lie on, rather than armchairs and other proper upright furniture. Isolde hated it, she glanced in at the doorway and then turned on her heel and walked away, her high heels tapping, just like someone already grown-up, busily pacing the corridors of their place of work. And Barbara was too impatient for quite so much indolence, got rapidly bored with languid sounds and smells, would jump up, chuck a balled sock or a paper dart at Tom, and depart. She didn't get on with Tom at all these days, and she had never liked Tom Rose. Which left just me and the two of them, perusing the latest music papers and album covers, and staring into space.