Somewhere in the middle of the thorny, littered wood there was a clearing, and an oak tree. It was broad and big, with low-growing branches dipping from its trunk. 'This must have been here years before all the rest. Look at the size of it,' he said, thumping its trunk. 'Go on, climb up.'
I hadn't ever learned to climb trees. It wasn't the sort of skill you picked up round our way, not with all those hawthorns. Even though it looked like a good climbing tree with stout horizontal branches, the first ones were still some way up, high above my head. The trunk was well-used, shiny with slithered footmarks. This was yet another thing Barbara had never mentioned, or shown me.
'Oh, God,' Tom said, in the kind of voice in which people say, 'I suppose I'll have to do it.' He swung his arms around a branch above his head, and then lunged his body into a pendulum effect. On the third swing his feet caught round the branch and he hauled himself up on to it. After that it was easy, footholds and handholds within reach all the way up.
I tried the same method, but couldn't get my legs high enough. Eventually I scrabbled them up on to the trunk and he hauled me, painfully, over the first branch. My ribs were scraped, right through my jumper. I climbed after him, holding my breath, not looking down.
We stood only about twenty feet up, I suppose, on alternate hitches, facing each other. But it felt very high to me. You could see out over the wood. You could see surprisingly far away. In my direction, over the bungalow roofs, towards the cluster of far-off taller buildings that was town, and in the distance a thin grey line not much darker than the sky: the sea. Tom faced the low green hills, the main road.
'I wish it was higher. I wish I could get right to the top,' Tom said. 'I've been higher, but you can't get right up there.'
'There are caterpillars in these leaves.' I was trying not to feel disgusted.
He grinned. 'Caterpillars, and spiders. All kinds of bugs.'
I wasn't going to let him put me off. I said, 'It's quiet up here.' It was. Miles away, you could hear someone whistling for a dog, but that was all.
'I know.'
We listened for a bit, hearing the quiet keenly. I think we'd scared all the birds away.
'Oh, I can hear Sebastian,' I said. He had started learning the trumpet. I could pick out its uncertain blasts, remote and barely musical. 'I can hear your house.'
Tom began kicking the trunk.
'Someone's always doing something in your house,' I said, happily. 'There's always someone there.'
I noticed that his sweet mouth was pressed into an angry line.
'I know,' he said. Kick, kick. 'That's the bloody problem. The bloody fucking problem.'
And that was the problem. I didn't seek to compare the two, our house and their house. I kept them completely separate in my mind, as if to place them side by side would be to damage or endanger them in some way. The Hennessys' house, household, way of life, was separate and complete; and so was ours. Just hold your breath, and don't look.
Only, of course, I longed to live there, to be them and not me, not we, especially not we. Because while we disliked and were dismayed by them, they despised and disparaged us. And who wants to be on the receiving end of that?
*
I said to Brian, casually, 'Have you ever been in the woods? Do you know the climbing tree?'
'Course I do. Everyone does. Me and Pete go there. We go right to the top.'
So that told me.
Once Tom showed me the oak tree, it became part of the territory I roamed in. Later that summer we found that someone had fixed up a swinging rope in its branches. Sebastian was furious. 'Someone else has been here! Someone else has been in our tree!'
There wasn't much space to swing, but it was the only big tree anywhere around. So maybe everyone did know it.
We took turns to climb up and swing on the rope. It was thick, and beneath the knot it frayed into a tassel like the feathers on a carthorse's hoof. You swung, twirling, leaf litter beneath your feet, the network of branches and leaves above letting flashes of sunlight down. The rope creaked suspiciously above you. Any minute it might break; your neck with it, or at least your legs and arms. But we couldn't keep off it. We hated giving it up for the next person's turn.
When it wore thin and frayed to breaking point, another rope appeared, and then another, hanging beside the rags of all the old ropes. I never found out who put them there but I bet Brian knew.
27
Seeing Is Believing
Hanny doesn't eat with other people. She has to eat alone in her room, and her meals are supervised. She's got a way round it, though. It's so boring, supervising her, she said, that they don't always watch, not all the time. She showed me how, inside her big bell-shaped sleeves, she has picked the deep hem undone and put a little plastic bag into it. Into the bag go bits of food, whenever they're not looking. 'I'm just like a conjurer,' she said, 'I'm so quick.'
'Maybe you could make your living doing that, when you get out of here.'
'What, sticking food up my sleeves?' she said, but I knew she knew what I meant.
When she folded her sleeves back to show me the plastic bags inside, I could see her wrists. They were as thin and white as I expected. And they had scars on them. One was white, diagonal, from the bottom of her thumb across to the bumps of her wristbone. The scar on the other arm was raised, red, with pink flesh around it, as if it were newer. It made me think of Barbara and our club, the blunt knife and the brooch pin and the blood brotherhood. I don't think Hanny had wanted to mingle her blood with anyone else's. And I don't think she'd just used a pin.
But I believe she must have meant for me to see her scars.
*
We were in Woolworth's once when I glimpsed Patrick. I'd never actually seen him out anywhere before, only driving away in his van. He was up at the far end, where they used to have the tea bar. He stood by the counter with a cup of coffee and chatted animatedly to the girl who was serving. I was with Barbara and Gaynor, but they were right across the other side of the shop. We weren't stealing anything, we didn't steal from Woolworth's any more: it was small-fry. We were just shopping, out for a wander, out for a look. I tried to drift past but Patrick saw me, caught my eye. He put out a hand, almost touching me. 'Well, hello there, Caro! What're you about?' I didn't quite know what he meant: what are you doing, or what are you drinking? His white cup was still in his hand. He might have been offering me a cup of coffee. I said vaguely, looking away, 'Oh ... I'm just out shopping, with Barbara. She's over there.' I pointed vaguely. My face felt red.
'Well, well,' he said. 'Then off you go, quick. I'd better not keep you if the lovely Barbara wants your company.' And he turned back to the girl behind the counter, affability itself.
I hurried over to Barbara and Gaynor, and bundled them out of the shop. 'Your dad's here,' I said.
'Well, so what?' asked Barbara. Yes, so what? I didn't know.
But it was the first time a Hennessy, apart from Barbara, had seen me out in public. Had noticed me, had spoken to me.
At the secondary mod there was something called Social Service. This wasn't what it is coming to mean. It wasn't anything to do with unmarried mothers, or people who batter their children, or families that are not really functioning. Anyway, families did seem to function – as long as they knew what they were supposed to be like, they managed to keep up appearances. As long as they cared. And everyone knew what you were supposed to be like. Or everyone I knew, at least.
Social Service was helping people less fortunate than ourselves. It was character-building. It was raising money for charity by organizing a sponsored walk, or it was visiting deaf old ladies in the nearby home for the elderly. Or it was knitting squares. Each different year in the school did a different kind of Social Service, and in the first year the task was knitting. Knitting squares for afghans, the teacher said. I just hoped they wanted them.
'I've got to knit a six-inch square,' I told my mother when I got home.
'Well, go on, then,'
she said. It might seem obvious, with all the knitting and sewing that she did, that she would have passed her skills on to me. But I had avoided learning. It's easy when you're young, always ducking out to play, needing to practise those bicycle turns, just having to get in some more roller-skate miles. But with secondary school came female skills. She took my clumsy hands in hers and forced them into the shapes for knit one, purl one. A lumpy bit of knitting, as disgusting as tripe in the butcher's tray, emerged from my needles. It was baby-blue, a colour she happened to have spare. The edges were steps and stairs, four inches wide at one side, seven on the other.
'Can't you do it for me?' I pleaded.
'Most certainly not.' Social Service was Social Service. The merit was in doing it yourself. You couldn't pay other people to do it for you. Or even not pay them to do it for you. I took my scrappy square in to school. I discovered that afghans were blankets, sewn together from even-sized squares of knitting. Mine failed the entrance test. I was put on stitching the squares together. Even this I was bad at. I hadn't inherited my mother's deft fingers.
Another kind of Social Service was taking library books round the wards of the long-stay hospital. This was for the more mature pupils. Somehow I had become mature, despite my incompetence over knitted squares. We were driven there during the lunch break by Miss Jessop, the RE teacher: me and Suzannah Grey and Mildred Clark. I think we were chosen because we happened to be wearing the most respectable skirts. Long-stay patients were not to be inflamed. We were given boxes of books and a hospital trolley with an eccentric offside front wheel. I don't know how this was supposed to build our characters, though it certainly gave us practice for a grand future as tea ladies, should we decide to follow that career path.
I expect what the patients wanted were Wild West novels and syrupy romances and good old-fashioned murders, and there was a sprinkling of those, well thumbed. But on the whole our barrowload of literary goodies was mind-improving, and it was with these we had to tempt the bedridden, and the frail-but-mobile types who congregated in the day room. A history of ecclesiastical decoration. Fruit-preserving for beginners. Beethoven and his world. A guide to the Swiss Alps. It was uphill work.
And then one lunchtime, on top of the pile I was sorting was a book about twentieth-century art. I sat down on a vacant chair and leafed through it. Let's face it, none of the patients was going to snatch it from my hands. They clamoured for Zane Grey and Georgette Heyer, not modern art. Thick paint, obscure shapes, stupid splattery canvases. I reached the chapter on portraiture, rather a thin one. On one of the pages, only taking up half the space (the top half was a scribbly head and shoulders of a miserablelooking old man), was a painting, 'Tillie: In an Interlude'.
It was definitely Tillie. Not by Patrick. I can't remember who it was by. But I noticed the date. Over twenty years ago. She sat, half sideways to the viewer, with light streaming down on her from a high window. Her dress was sky-blue, and lit white on the far side by the sunshine; her fair hair hung heavy like some thick crop stood ready for harvesting; her expression was far away, untroubled, thoughtful. Physically she looked just the same as now, except that she was very pregnant.
So Tillie was real. Tillie was famous. Tillie had really sat for artists out in the world, artists who got their pictures put in books. Hennessys existed outside of their house, outside my fevered imagination. I could hardly believe it.
My school took me off Social Service before the term was up. They said I had stolen a book. I honestly thought that no one would miss it, but it was a bit too big to hide.
Hanny and I still have that quiz. I keep it as a bookmark, folded up in the back of my one book. The best bit about the quiz is that we don't know what the hell it's about and we don't have the answers. The first time we got to question twelve and completed it, Hanny said, 'OK. Let's see how we've done. What we scored. Are we the Hostess with the Mostest or the Pathetic Party Bore?' And then she screamed. It made me think of Barbara, that short, sharp, artificial scream of rage she let out when she got to the bottom of the column. ' "Turn to page 29 to see how you rate ..." We don't have page twenty-nine. And rate as what? As what!?'
But once she got over her frustration it was better. It was better not to have the results. We could make them up. It kept the quiz interesting for much longer than a whole quiz would have been. We became obsessed by it.
Hanny leaned back and lifted up her knees, hugging them. She raised her eyes to the sky. 'You scored mostly As: You are a homeloving type with a deeply dull soul. You will give your future husband socks for Christmas and deny him your body.'
'Mostly Bs,' I said. 'You're a free spirit, a wild soul. A pain in the arse. Your friends loathe you and your family pretend you're not theirs. Throw away your hand-woven clothes and comb your hair. Please. As a favour to mankind.'
'This magazine begs you.'
'This anonymous magazine begs you—'
We saw Moira advancing down the path. Her tiny shoes made miraculously fast progress over the paving slabs. She was coming towards us. We were laughing too much. Enjoying ourselves. We stopped at once and turned drab faces towards her. We didn't want to give anything away.
28
Discomfort
Today I came around the corner at the appointed hour for my little chat, just before the appointed hour, and saw Lorna standing there in the hallway with Dr Travis. She was saying something, something that sounded like '... getting nowhere fast, absolutely nowhere'. He leaned towards her a little, wearing that sweet, attentive but ever-so-slightly distant expression of his. He always looks like that, as if he is listening in order to be polite but really is not terribly interested. I like that about him. I prefer it. Lorna is avid, but he is just a well-brought-up boy, doing his job.
Then they saw me. And shut up.
I began to catch sight of Mandy in the high street.
Instead of spending her Saturdays in Charisse, now she went into town and hung around with other kids who were at a loose end. Rough kids, the sort I never spoke to and even avoided glancing at. I'd see her sitting on the ledge at the foot of the war memorial, swinging her thin bare legs. It wasn't meant to be a seat, just an innocent ledge, part of the memorial's design. Perhaps it was included so that mourners could rest flowers on it, or wreaths on Poppy Day. Only now it had become a seat for disaffected youth, lounging and kicking their heels against the meat-coloured marble sides. There was a horse trough too, from the days when horses made up a considerable part of the passing traffic, and the council had tried to plant it up with petunias. Only disaffected youth rested its bottom there and squashed the petunias flat. Perhaps in the days of horse-drawn traffic and war dead there was no time for disaffected youth. Perhaps little children grew straight from button boots and pinafores into work clothes and were too busy and too hungry and too tired to look around and complain. Far too preoccupied with scraping a living to go off the rails.
Then I saw Tom in town with a girl.
It was Mandy who drew this to my attention. Mandy was up at the secondary modern now, too. Sometimes we happened to pass in the corridors and would nod mutely, but that was the limit of our acknowledgement. She was usually with a gaggle of girls, those noisy and self-possessed types who never took any notice of the pecking order of age. I could see that she was emerging from her shell again. Whatever had gone horribly wrong for her had righted itself, or maybe she'd adjusted to it. I don't know. She was a closed book to me. Those opaque grey eyes looked at you but never let you know what she was thinking. I don't know what that says about the windows of the soul – maybe that Mandy had no soul?
Her face wore exactly the same look as it had when she was a child, and I could see just how she would be as an adult. She didn't change as other people changed, their bones expanding and altering the proportions of their faces, prettiness arriving or departing. She stayed the same, with that mean-eyed, hunted, shocked white face, that undernourished face of hers, permanently starving for something she couldn't have.
I was standing at the bus stop one afternoon, feeling blank, just waiting, when Mandy appeared at my side. 'That boy that lives next door to you,' she said. I made sure my face stayed impassive. Mandy knew everyone, God knows how. Perhaps her years of eavesdropping on all the gossip in Charisse had equipped her with this knowledge. Her brain was a gazetteer, she had the town's complete set of mugshots and fingerprints embedded there. Just a quick flick and someone, anyone, could be located. There should have been a great future ahead for a girl with such talents. She went on, 'I seen him on the prom. In a shelter. Wiv a girl. Black hair, mascara. You know her? Paula, her name is. Paula Wright.'
Mandy watched me with her head on one side, her cheek bulging with gum. I gave her a theatrical frown, then an irritated grin. 'What? What are you talking about? What's that got to do with me?'
Mandy shrugged. 'Just thought you'd want to know.' And she slid away as easily as she'd arrived.
So then I knew where to look.
Seeing Tom with a girl actually wasn't as bad as imagining seeing Tom with a girl.
There was something about him – he was indisputably attractive, not only to me. Despite his light eyes and his pale lashes, his careless lack of chivalry. Perhaps because of his lack of chivalry. So there was indeed a black-haired girl with a fair amount of mascara. But her hair was short, like a cap, and she wasn't at all pretty. She was even a bit fat. I caught a glimpse of them, not that same afternoon (although I looked, I wasted a good hour or more hunting him down) but a few days later. She was walking quickly along the seafront, and Tom was hurrying after her with that uneven loping stride he had at the time, as if he hadn't yet got used to his height and the terrible size of his feet. I had imagined them entwined on a seat, gazing fondly into each other's eyes, or worse. I watched the girl stop. Tom touched her shoulder with an outstretched hand. They exchanged a few words. The girl shrugged his hand away, and then they parted, walking off in different directions. Neither of them looked back.
Living In Perhaps Page 19
