Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  Or the don't love'em and don't even bother to leave'em type. Use and discard, then pretend they never existed. Erase them from the record.

  'And you were always in the house. Even when everyone else had gone. She said Tillie said' – God, it sounded like playground tittle-tattle! – 'that even then you'd hang around, when there was no one else to talk to, that you'd plague Tillie. Taking up her time. They didn't know how to get rid of you. You were getting as bad as your brother.'

  'And Tom? What did she say about me and Tom?'

  He had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  'Not much.'

  I tried to drill into his eyes with mine, make him look at me again. He knew how it was with me and Tom, he knew all about those odd arrangements. He was part of them.

  'And what did you say to her?'

  'Not much, either.'

  'Well, that was probably for the best. The truth's not very palatable.' He winced, but I think it was only at the big word.

  'The truth is, it was always you more than him, Caro. And you wouldn't see it that way.'

  Oh yes, I did. That was clear from the start. But I existed on scraps. That's the way it is with a pet, a pet that's not really cherished or loved but kept out of habit, under sufferance, out of guilt. Not that Tom ever felt any guilt. He was blissfully unburdened with that. They all were.

  Tom Rose coughed and carried on, grumbling into his hands again. 'Personally, I think she was being a bit harsh. I mean, we both spent a lot of time there, didn't we? We both preferred it to what we'd got at home. And it didn't seem a problem. Not for a long time.'

  I glanced back at the door. Maybe I could call the guard. Maybe I could request his assistance with this young man who was bothering me. He might enjoy rugby-tackling a visitor for a change.

  Tom Rose said, more firmly now, 'But you've got to move on, Caro. You can't keep stuck in one place all the time.'

  I thought he was referring to my prospects now, to the future, and life.

  'Everybody grew up and moved on. And you stayed the same.'

  I felt weak, washed up. But something rankled.

  'What did you mean about Brian? My brother?'

  Tom Rose rubbed his forehead again, and took a surreptitious squint at his watch. He was as exhausted by this as I was.

  'Oh, that he was a creepy little sod. Everyone knew that. Lurking, spying, setting little traps and leaving signs he'd been there, just to make you feel – I dunno – not right. Not quite safe. That's how Barbara put it.'

  Barbara, who stormed through the world scaring nuns and shopkeepers – feeling not quite safe?

  'She found a mouse paw in her hairbrush once.'

  'She what?'

  'Found a mouse's paw in her hairbrush. Just a paw. Dead, obviously. Someone had put it there, for her to find, in her room.'

  'She's just making that up!' Anyone could have put it there; she had a house full of brothers. And besides, Barbara didn't possess a hairbrush.

  'And he was always setting fires. In the woods, in the fields. Just little fires. But he knew how to do it.'

  'This is just Barbara's say-so.'

  Tom Rose looked to be in pain again.

  'I don't know, Caro. It's all just one big mess.'

  So that was Barbara's version of me – now I knew. Best friend, blood brother. But we never took the vow.

  'She didn't say it was you. And she was angry and upset. Devastated.' Now there's a big word. 'She just told them where to start looking.'

  So it was Barbara. I never knew that. I thought those two policemen arriving at the door, and the flock of professional-thises and court-appointed-thats who followed on, were just part of the inevitable parade. Because opportunities aren't just there for the taking and nearly everything ends in trouble, anyway. Because I'm the sort who always looks guilty. Because somebody finally picked me out from the crowd.

  Tom Rose sat back in his chair, collapsed now, hands loose on his substantial thighs.

  'Was she right, or not?'

  50

  Tillie: In an Interlude

  Raining again. Trudy was right. So I'm stuck here in the patients' lounge, feeling the opposite of patient. 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' That was another of my aunt Gloria's phrases.

  I close my eyes and wish it was a fine day, that I was out there somewhere, with the sun shining and a sweet breeze blowing. I wish I was Carolyn. I'd be bowling along through the pleasant countryside, not a care in the world. Driving my own car (open-topped, of course), and wearing a summer dress and big sunglasses and my hair tied back with a scarf to keep it out of my eyes. The car's a birthday present from my father. ('Second-hand, darling! We don't want to spoil her,' my mother warns him, but with an indulgent smile.) I'd be on my way to a party or a date, the whole weekend a glorious expanse before me. I press down the accelerator and feel the tug of the open road, the fields and hills around me beckoning.

  Or, better still, I'm out in those green hills riding my milk-white horse, with just the thump of his hooves and the clink of the bit and the birdsong for company. And any moment now I'll gather up the reins and spur him on and we'll gallop off over the horizon, as far as we can go.

  If wishes were horses.

  I close my eyes and wish it with all my heart, and then I open my eyes again and I'm still here.

  It's dangerous, anyway, wishing with all your heart. Sometimes what you wish for comes true, but in ways you hadn't meant. Or not entirely. If you wish really hard for something bad to happen, and it happens, then you must be responsible. Surely.

  Today Lorna's bouncing with energy. She's full of fleeting smiles and twinkly glances, as if she's on to something. Me.

  She studies the file, pursing her mouth like someone in front of a baker's window, trying to choose the most delicious cake. 'Your brother was always the practical one. Good with his hands. And you were the one with ideas.' A pause, one of her clichéd dramatic effects. 'And both of you were angry with your mother.'

  No, that's not it. That's not it at all. If we were angry with anyone—

  'To go back to my earlier point ...' she says.

  What does she mean? It's not a game we're playing here. It's fact versus fiction. Life or death. Brian's a man of action. I've always been the dreamer. That's how I'd put it.

  There is nothing to keep me here. There might be locks on the doors and plenty of safety glass, but there are no bars on the windows, no security fences, no watchtowers and spotlights and screaming dogs. Only miles and miles of open countryside to stop us running away, just fields and woods and pleasant rolling hills.

  There is nothing to keep me here but Lorna's firm looks and the gentle voice of Dr Travis urging me, 'Will you try harder, Carol? Will you try?'

  And the thought of where I might go instead.

  I know what Lorna would like me to say, in order to make some progress, and then, she hopes, move on. And presumably she has got my best interests at heart. Though I know what Hanny would say, too: don't you believe it! But Hanny doesn't know Lorna, her dealings were all with Dr Travis. Dr Travis got her out of here. Or maybe he let her down. I would like to get out of here, and not back to that place I was in before, that stank of institutions and sounded like an execution, that slamming and slamming of doors. I'd like to move on.

  To be honest—

  To be honest, I say, and in my mind I'm stopped by Hanny's hollow shout of laughter that picks up and punctuates every contradiction, every slip from form.

  To be completely honest, though, I'm tired. Exhausted. I'm not fit to step out on to the tightrope. I can't remember half of what I've said.

  They said I got Brian to help me. They said he believed the house to be empty. They said I had given him the information.

  But Tillie never went away.

  And I knew that.

  This is what Lorna wants. She wants me to say what I did. She wants me to say that I climbed the wooden steps ahead of Brian, because I knew that the door was always
unlocked, on the latch, waiting for a bold kick or just the gentlest pressure of fingertips. Or that I led him round the creaking boards of the veranda, trailing my hands along the flaking wooden window ledges, showing him by word or simply by gesture how tinder-dry, how ready the whole place was, set like a batch of kindling in a hearth, just lying there and waiting for a match. That I took him to the back door, and into the silent kitchen, where glasses stood upturned on the draining board, and a handful of ox-eye daisies fading in a jar. On the table a small loaf left to prove, in the blue striped bowl, under a damp tea-cloth. Only a small loaf. The Van Hoogs were away, Tom in America, Patrick and the boys camping in France. That I knew all that. No one else at home.

  Into the passage, so unusually quiet that the sound of the quiet and of the dust circling slowly through the afternoon air was palpable, like a gauze scarf falling softly over our heads and settling on our shoulders. The black-haired girl in the passageway staring her baleful stare. How Brian might have paused, staring back at her cold flesh.

  And so into the hall, where the blue curtain hung in dusty folds at the foot of the stairs. No sound from beyond it. Up the stairs, with the brown runner worn around the stair ends by so many feet, so many journeys up and down, so that you felt your feet going from beneath you at each step, without ever quite slipping. Up through slabs of sunlight, picking out the dusty, dirty stairs. On to the landing, the smell of dust, Hennessys, and above all wood, wood, throughout the house. Throughout the house the dry paper of a thousand books, comics, magazines, dry begging fabrics, curtains, horsehair, tartan, shawls, the slippery manmade fabrics of the clothes in Tillie's wardrobe. Canvases, stacked, and flammable oils. Up, up, through the house.

  Into the white attic. The long white attic, where the breeze always blows. Or not. On hot, still days like this one at the very end of summer, the attic was a furnace under the roof tiles, collecting all the heat that rose from below.

  What would we have seen then, Brian and I, always supposing I had led him, deftly, with all my knowledge of the house? Would we have found Tillie, in an interlude, painting? Lost in thought, standing before a canvas, magnificently flooded with light, with aspects of light?

  Or perhaps she stood there in front of a blank canvas, blank herself. It had been so long, she had lost her touch. Or lost touch with any ideas she had of how to convey an image, or what image to convey.

  I prefer to think she stood in front of a half-finished picture, a painting of tenderest luminous light. She stepped back a moment, holding the brush, just to see how she was doing. She was doing as well as ever.

  In the heavenly stillness of the empty house, as she painted, Tillie would remember how it was to be undisturbed, to fall back into concentration like falling headlong into still green water. Immersing herself, letting go, sinking to the bottom as the weed streamed past, not heeding the calls back to the surface. There was no one to call her back to the surface. Not today.

  Did they think it was there that we dropped the first match? Did they think that was how she was when the house went up?

  What shall I say? What do you want me to say?

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Francesca Liversidge for making this possible, my delightful editor Sarah Turner for her insight, and the rest of the team at Transworld for their boundless enthusiasm and commitment. And lastly – but never least – I would like to thank Brett for his tireless support and belief in me.