Tom leaned over and said to me, as if he'd just noticed my presence: 'Where is it that you live?'
'Down the road.'
'Where exactly? Which house?'
'Next door,' I said, faintly.
'Next door? At Mister Clipper's?' And he made a gesture to go with it, an imitation of someone using hedge clippers, just like my father. 'Then you must be Caroline Clipper. Caroline Clipper!' And he laughed and laughed, rolling back on to the bed and hugging his ribs. He made more noise than he strictly needed to. 'She's Caroline Clipper!' he shouted to Tom Rose. Tom Rose was sitting on the floor cross-legged, idly rolling the poker dice. He laughed too, but only quietly.
'I'm not really his,' I said. 'I told you. I was adopted.'
'Oh yes,' said Tom, and his eyes locked with Tom Rose's for a second, and I knew they knew I was making it up.
'I wouldn't live there if it was up to me. But what can I do about it till I'm older?'
'Run away?' offered Tom Rose.
'As if I could!'
'Run away with me,' laughed Tom.
'Come here. Yes, you.'
When Tom kissed, it was with his jaw and teeth. This was a disappointment to me. I'd thought kissing must be like melting. That's what it looked like on TV. Instead it was a kind of grinding of hard surfaces. Something you'd really have to work at developing a liking for, like beer. The next thing, a split second after the gum-grinding began, was the shocking entry of his tongue into my mouth. It was very invasive, into somewhere as private as one's own mouth. Meeting lips was a meeting of equals; having Tom's tongue wiggling into my mouth was quite different. It was hot and lively, like some terrible pet that is put into your hands for a moment and gets instantly out of control, hurrying up your sleeves or down your neck, exploring, inquisitive. I must have reared my head away from him, because I felt his hand on the base of my skull, pressing me back down on to his tongue. God, if this is kissing, I thought, I had better go to Barbara's school and give myself up as a nun.
I have to say that, technically, Tom Rose had the advantage. I didn't like him at all, and kissed him under duress, but with him kissing was how I expected, a soft melting, a much more comfortable experience all round. He seemed to have lips where Tom had hard jaws, and he used them to cushion the place where we met, and his tongue only came out slowly and thoughtfully, a bit like a snail from its shell. His tongue sought my tongue, not my fillings. He seemed to solve the problem of the noses instinctively, as if there wasn't any problem there at all. If only he could have passed his technique on to Tom.
In Tom's bright, bare, dusty room, we sat on the floor, pressing jaw to jaw. I was aware of other sounds elsewhere in the house: Patrick calling out joyously, 'Now isn't that always the way?', and a door slamming in the breeze from other open doors, and Mattie droning below in the front garden, and someone running lightly down the long staircase, tapping something hard and rattling on the banisters all the way down. I was conscious of the dustballs on the floor, and the smell of socks, and the droop of the red tartan blanket, frayed at the edge, as it hung off the side of the bed.
'Now me,' Tom would say, and a bit later, 'Now Tom.'
Did Tom Rose want this? Did Tom Rose have the same antipathy for me as I had for him? But then, as I had learned from the nuns, via Barbara, boys were only after one thing. They would use every opportunity that befell them to achieve that one thing, even with girls they had no other use for. Particularly with girls they had no other use for.
But perhaps in Tom's hands we were both powerless – experimental animals, laboratory mice – doing and being done unto as required, clinical and detached. For the purposes of the experiment, I was quite willing. At least, I was not entirely unwilling.
'I've got a boyfriend,' Hanny told me, 'on the outside. I don't much like him. My mother set him up for me.'
'Your mother?'
'My mother the matchmaker.'
'What, she wants you to marry him?'
'No. She just wants me not to be a social pariah.'
I glanced at Hanny. She was giving me her sideways look. Her ironical look. I smiled. She was joking. Maybe none of what she'd said was true.
'His name's David. A nice boy. In my mother's words.'
There was a little silence, while we watched some faded brown and pink blossom bowl along the pathway in the wind just like the merry hoop of an Edwardian child in carefree days of yore. If ever there were any carefree days of yore. If Edwardian children were not just as sunk as us under the weight of their tweeds and their boots and parental expectations and parental neglect.
'Have you got a boyfriend?' Hanny said. 'I shouldn't ask. I hate to ask, really. That's the kind of thing my mother thinks passes for unaffected social chit-chat. That, and enquiring of newly married women if they're pregnant yet.'
'No,' I said, because it was true. A little truth. I had imparted to Hanny a little tiny truth.
26
Appendage
I got to be a sort of appendage at the Hennessys' house.
Adolescence is a funny time, when you're not one thing and you're not another; not a child any more, nor a grown-up. Neither fish nor fowl. A bit of both. It must have been the hormones, the great chemical inner sea washing about, throwing up equinoctial tides. It seemed as if there were long hours to fill, huge long pauses, when you were waiting to feel something, or do something, or be something, which you couldn't yet feel or do or be. Sometimes I just wanted to lie there and watch the light moving round on the wall, and let the almost pleasurable misery and boredom wash over me. And this was best done undisturbed. It felt as if I was always in the Hennessys' house, but that wasn't true. There were swathes of time at home, devoted to piano practice, homework, chores, to hiding in my room. There were whole days when I didn't visit the Hennessys, though never quite whole weeks.
Barbara was often out with other friends now, or talking on the phone to them. (They got an extra telephone around this time. Mr and Mrs Van Hoog had always had one, but only the grownups were allowed to use it. Now there was a cream-coloured extension in the hall, and usually Barbara attached to it, sitting on the bottom stair.) If I missed anything it was the intensity our early friendship had, but I no longer minded if she wanted me or not. I felt I had no real need of her now.
I crept out of the corners where I used to hide with a book, I floated out from Barbara's wake into the open waters. And no one sent me on my way. No one suggested I shouldn't be there. It was lovely. I felt almost like one of the family then.
Sometimes I would sit on the veranda with Isolde, doing something useful like shelling peas or peeling potatoes. Chores didn't feel like chores when I did them here. She would ask me about school, or what I'd been reading, careful constructive questions, like a grown-up helping you join in a conversation. They were rather impersonal conversations, and restful because of it. Once I was sitting there, reading a book, while Isolde wrote a letter to some foreign penpal. Patrick paused beside us, a cheery beery smell about him. He stood on the grass and looked at us through the rails, wrapping one hand round the upright. There were curling brown hairs growing all over the back of his hand, and a bloody gouge on his thumb knuckle.
'Well, well, well, look at this, now. One's writing her memoirs, the other's reading 'em. I'd like to have the time you young ladies have at your disposal. Haven't I always said that, Izzy? That one day I'll devote time to study? Become a scholar. What do you say to that?'
I hardly dared look up. I think he was addressing me.
'A scholar and a gentleman. D'you think that's on the cards, eh, Izzy?'
'Doubt it,' said Isolde, and went on writing.
I liked to sit in the kitchen while Tillie cooked and Sebastian drew at the kitchen table. Sebastian was always drawing. He did highly coloured scenes of gore and destruction, of people dropping in flames from blazing aeroplanes, knights in armour with long sharp poles sticking right through them, chainmail warriors with axes splitting their heads. He liked to scatte
r careful vignettes of severed limbs, discarded bloodstained weaponry, vultures hovering, torn flags trailing in the puddles. Tillie would glance over his shoulder and say, 'That's very good. I like your horses,' or 'Good colouring in,' or 'Sharpen your pencil.' She never commented on the subject matter. Sebastian was a loving little boy who never, to my knowledge, deliberately squashed insects or set small fires in dry weeds with a magnifying glass. He was often to be found cuddling with Tillie on the swing-seat, or crosslegged on her bed in front of the TV with his thumb firmly in his mouth. Patrick would tip him upside-down by his ankles and Sebastian just hung there, laughing, his arms lank and his corkscrew curls tickling the floor. 'You'll make a fine artist one day, boy,' Patrick said. 'They'll bring back narrative painting just for you.'
Mattie drew as well. Mattie drew brilliantly, replicas of what he saw, in thin, taut, scratchy lines. He drew the pony in the field, and the Hennessys' house, with the veranda and the two front doors.
I wish I had that drawing of Mattie's with me now. I wish I had it in here with me now. I'd like a picture of their house.
The Hennessys got a dog. When I first knew them they never had any pets at all, then one day Patrick came home with a dog, and suddenly they were fully fledged pet owners, canine experts.
Brian and I had kept pets before. I'm surprised our mother allowed them, but she set firm limits. Pets had to be small, inexpensive and short-lived. They couldn't come into the house – except the goldfish, which lived on the lounge window sill in a spherical bowl with a plastic castle to swim round. The others had to stay in the garden or the shed. None of them lasted long, not even as long as the pet shop suggested they should. Brian managed to smash the fishbowl, and just watched as the fish flapped wanly on the window sill, gasping its last. The mice ate their babies and then were found one morning stiff and cold. And the guinea pig escaped. That's what Brian said. He'd had it grazing on the lawn and it ran away under the hedge. He attempted to catch it with his hands, then hook it out with a stick. Neither worked. 'I tried,' he told me, 'but I couldn't get it. Good riddance! If it wants to live in there, it can. Just see how long it lasts.' I kept an eye out for it when I was in the next-door garden, but nothing materialized.
But now the Hennessys had a dog, and any pet experiences of mine were not to be compared.
Question: what would you rather have – a cuddly Labrador pup, or an elegant Siamese cat? I would imagine the most enjoyable bit about having a dog is having it as a puppy first. Puppies are playful. Puppies are always beautiful, no matter what the adult dog looks like later. They use their big feet and their big eyes to maximum effect. Long-haired ones are fluffy, and short-haired ones are velvety to the touch. They don't stink yet.
The dog Patrick brought home was full-grown, or as full-grown as it was ever going to get. I don't know where he got it from and they never said. It was another Hennessy mystery, a taken-as-read. Patrick called him Pickles, and there was no debate about that, either. Another nice part of pet-owning is deciding on the name. Brian and I had got into angry spats over this, and I'm sure the Hennessys would have spilt blood in the deciding. But they had to forgo this particular pleasure.
Pickles was a Jack Russell, though partly something else as well. He was mostly white, but with a round brown spot on his haunch just like a target, and his left front side was brown too, from shoulder to paw, as if he had his leg plunged in a pantomime thigh-boot. He was a tense little creature, hard to the touch, as taut as a cooked sausage about to burst out of its skin. He knew certain commands – 'Fetch!' and 'Sit!' – but found the spotlight of people's attention very stimulating and difficult. If they said 'Sit!' he would instantly touch bottom to ground, and just as instantly raise it up again, wiggling, waiting for the next instruction. He was desperate to know if you were pleased with his performance. Poor, insecure, over-eager Pickles. They would throw something, a ball, a stick, and shout 'Fetch!' and he'd run, get halfway there before he needed to look back over his shoulder, checking almost, was he on course? Was this what they'd meant? His back half would keep springing away and his front half, turning, would brake, and before he knew it his uncontrollable body had swung right round and he was still galloping, galloping, but in quite the wrong direction. He would finish up at their feet, sit down, neatly tucking in his hindquarters, and look up, smiling, keen to please. 'Where's the ball, Pickles?' they would say, and he'd look anxiously back over his shoulder, and smile up at them again. 'Where's the fucking ball, then?' Tom would say, shaking with laughter, and then skim an imaginary one, sending Pickles racing off again, body concertinaing.
Discovering how hopeless he was, the Hennessys made it a hobby of theirs – a point of demonstration – to humiliate Pickles. Patrick and the boys particularly liked to send him rushing off indoors, where his claws skated on the varnished boards and he bounced like a rocking horse, going nowhere. Isolde was his champion, crooning to him, 'Poor Pickly-wickly. Are they cruel to you?' and massaging his velvet ears. But even she couldn't resist the temptation to push his ears into silly shapes, giving him a ludicrous expression, and call out to the others, 'Oh, look, look! Quick, look at Pickles now! He's doing his hen impression.' Or his donkey, or his owl.
Poor old Pickles.
Poor Pickles, they never even bothered to take him for a walk. He went off hunting in the neighbouring fields and woods and came back with scratches, and with burrs stuck to his ears. I think the rabbits beat him up, the fieldmice bit his nose.
It was a dog's life, believe me.
Once Pickles came in with an injured paw. Sebastian and Mattie were very excited because he had tracked bloody paw marks right over the boards of the back veranda and into the kitchen.
'Oh, poor thing,' Tillie cried, picking him up. 'He must have caught his paw in something.' She wrapped him in a tea towel so that all his legs except the damaged one were trapped, and took him over to the sink. She wet the corner of another tea towel under the tap and wiped at the blood. Pickles struggled, growling in the back of his throat. He looked so foolish and helpless that she gave him a shake and said, 'Poor silly old thing!' He stared up at her reproachfully. I couldn't help thinking of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland and the baby who turns into a pig. Except that Tillie was too nice to be the Duchess.
She cleaned his paw and wrapped it in a piece of bandage which immediately came off, and before the cut healed he walked around for a day or two with an ungainly tapping of his claws on the bare boards, three taps and a hop. And Patrick threatened to chop his leg off and fix on a wheel instead if he ever did it again, because he found the sound of it so infuriating.
Once Barbara no longer needed my daily, hourly presence, I could spend more and more time around Tom. Not strictly with him – you couldn't say with him, because he didn't exactly invite me – but then he didn't send me away or get up and go away himself. He sort of tolerated me, and sometimes much more than that. I was an appendage.
One of the things we did to amuse ourselves, Tom and Tom Rose and me, was play Monopoly. With them, Monopoly wasn't the quiet, plodding game that Brian and I had passed time with at Aunt Gloria's, it was a full-blooded, fast and ruthless exercise of Machiavellian tactics. Sometimes even Barbara could be cajoled into joining us. My typical strategy of buying the cheapest streets never paid off here. If I was lucky I boomeranged from Jail to Go To Jail and back again, which, though frustrating, lost me no money.
Tom Rose was usually the Banker, doling out our funds as required. He squirrelled away his investments and then often turned out to be holding all the utilities and most of the stations. I never quite saw him buy them, and he always had piles of cash. I didn't trust him at all.
'Why can't someone else be Banker for a change?' I suggested once. 'I could do it.'
The boys exchanged glances and just carried on playing.
Tom never let us call it a draw. He forced us to play on until every player but one was broke and mortgaged to the hilt. I never won a single game. I lacked the necessa
ry cruel streak, the lust for blood, the pleasure in seeing one's opponents writhe. Also, I was never allowed to be Banker.
'Let's go to the woods,' Tom said to me one day, as we sat on the veranda with nothing to do. Tom Rose was absent for once, so I had a chance to let him notice my special nature, my essential difference from every other girl.
'The woods?'
'Yes, the woods. Over the other side of the meadow.' The meadow was what they called the field that ran alongside their garden. 'The woods.'
Of course, I went. Thrilled, I went. He took my hand and pulled me after him, across the garden, through the barbed-wire fence and over the grass to the other side, where a wooden fence bordered a dense copse of low-growing, stunted trees. It didn't look inviting.
'I've never been in the woods,' I said. Too late.
'Never been in the woods? But they're only two fucking hundred fucking yards from your fucking house!' His voice got louder as he pronounced these words with great clarity. 'What do you do all day? What do you do with your life? Are you content just sitting next door in Mister Clipper's house, counting the flowers on the wallpaper? Waiting for the next cup of tea? Like a nice cup of tea, dear?' he mimicked, with a sneering expression on his face.
I looked at him, horrified. He must be able to see inside my head. Suck my brains out.
'Christ, some people!' he muttered, and stalked ahead, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
The wood was very thorny. I could feel my clothes being caught, and torn, and then my skin. But I kept on going. What you had to do around Tom and Tom Rose was never let them know you disliked anything or were uncomfortable about anything in case they spotted it and persecuted you with it. You just had to smile and laugh along with them, and when you didn't understand something you had to laugh even more enthusiastically, to cover up your ignorance. They couldn't seem to bear ignorance. They couldn't seem to bear people feeling anything, except to find life amusing, or ridiculous, or stupid. You hadn't ever to let on.
Living In Perhaps Page 18
