I was not born to be a child.
But he oh some people they never grow up.
PARTY
I’m tempted to get a television or a radio at least. I miss noise, chatter. God, how I used to wish it could be quiet. Just for a moment, to coast on a clear smooth wave of silence but there was always something. If it wasn’t the children squealing, or the television, Richard’s music – lovely music, Handel, Bach, but too persistent – or the radio, and that was my fault, I had the radio on most of the time just to hear a sane, adult, BBC voice, if it wasn’t any of those it would be the washing-machine churning, or the kettle rushing up to a boil, taps running, the microwave pinging, Robin’s battery robot, Billie’s squeaky toys, Richard’s bleeper, the alarm-clock, the door-bell, the telephone. Even if it was quiet in the house there was the sound of cars starting up on the road outside, the maddening sound of a car alarm, or sometimes our neighbour’s faulty burglar alarm that would go on and on and drive me round the bend, or a siren – somebody else’s emergency – and always as a background the grey roar of distant mingled traffic.
If I could just have silence, I used to think or say or sometimes shout, then I would be all right. Now I have silence more or less. I have no TV, radio, no washing-machine. The telephone, like myself, is unconnected and I will leave it that way. No one ever comes to the door. I can hear Trixie’s television sometimes, or her singing at night. Cars rarely pass because it’s a dead end, and although the main road isn’t far away, by some acoustic freak you cannot hear it from here. When I am up in my attic I can hear nothing at all. Funny. We lived in a nice suburb, gardens, trees, what you might think of as a quiet place. Now I live in the inner city and it is quieter. What I always wanted. But my mind scrambles quite desperately for distraction.
I want to buy a radio, at least, but I won’t. I wonder if I did I’d hear Richard’s voice appealing for my return. No, because then he’d be breaking his promise and Richard would never do that. I promised, when I phoned that if he leaves me alone, doesn’t try to find me, I’ll send a postcard every week so they’ll know I’m all right. So I do that, cheerful words, pictures that the children will like because of their colours. A red Matisse; a Bonnard with a red checked tablecloth, a woman and a black dog like the dog I used to have. Bonny, that’s funny, Bonny, Bonnard. No it’s not. I loved that dog. I used to take her to walk along the beach by the golf course in Felixstowe where I grew up, and sometimes right along the beach and across to Bawdsey in a little ferry rowed by an old man. We’d walk on the steep curves of brown shingle, by the sudden plunges of grey water where it was dangerous to swim and then miles across the estuary mud, Bonny’s paw prints looping and tangling round the neat twinned line of my footprints that would slowly fill with shining water. Sometimes, she’d roll in a dead fish or sea-gull and have to be bathed when I got home and the whole house would stink of wet dog. She’d follow my dad around, shaking all over him. My mum would grumble about the black hairs that made a wavy ring round the bath and the dog smell. Because I had no brothers or sisters, Bonny was like my sister.
My dad was a doctor. It’s funny that I married Richard without even thinking about that. You wouldn’t think it was possible to have so little insight. My parents were killed in an aeroplane crash when I was eighteen. I should have been with them. They’d been on holiday in Tuscany. I’d met a boy, my first lover, a fortnight before the holiday and decided I could not go. I could not be parted from him for three weeks – and besides the house would be empty. I pretended I wanted to stay to look after Bonny who had been ill, who would have been miserable in kennels. They were very dubious.
‘You will be sensible, won’t you?’
‘At least you can water the tomatoes.’
I waved them off and as the car rounded the corner of the road a surge of excitement rushed through me. The sun was hot and quivery on the road and the next three weeks were mine. I went and watered the tomatoes straight away, picked a few red ones. The greenhouse was humid, thick with the rank cattish stink of the plants. The fruit was developing at the bottom, growing like fat little green pearls halfway up and at the top the plants still bore little spiky yellow flowers beaded with wetness where I’d sprayed them. I thought, what must it be like to be grown-up, so grown-up that you grow tomatoes, have a nearly adult daughter you can leave at home and trust.
I cooked proper meals for the first time, meals for Mark, meals for other friends. We gave a dinner party with candles and wine. I did gazpacho and spent an entire day making ravioli, rolling the pasta thin as paper and parcelling up minced mushrooms. I made a lemon souffle that rose like a cloud. And I slept for twenty-one nights in my parents’ bed with Mark and had my first orgasm on the twentieth night. On the twenty-first night we had a party.
All day, Mark, my friend Louise and her boyfriend moved furniture and rolled up rugs and compiled tapes of dance music. I made giant pizzas and gallons of pink fruity punch. It was exciting and frightening. It was a good party at first but too many people came. Older people I didn’t know who wouldn’t take no for an answer. One even brought a baby in a carry-cot. I tried to get Mark to help me throw them out but he was very drunk and said to leave it. I was wearing tight jeans and only a silk scarf tied round my breasts since it was a hot night. And people kept looking at me and I knew how beautiful I was, seemed to be. So I got drunk too. People were smoking dope and I tried some and forgot for a while where I was, that this was my parents’ house. Mark made love to me in the garden, where there were other people who might have seen but I didn’t care, I even wanted them to see how happy I was.
Bonny followed me around anxiously all night, like a fretful aunt, her brown eyes reproachful, but I ignored her. I think someone must have given her something, some sort of drug or drink because she started yelping and running round in crazy circles, chasing her tail like she did as a puppy, then rolling about on the carpet, then falling asleep sprawled on the sofa where she was not allowed to be.
The silk scarf came off and I walked about topless after that. I can’t believe I did that now but I wasn’t the only one and people caressed me as I passed them, not my friends who had started leaving by then, but strange men and even a woman who kissed me in the hall. I saw Mark kissing someone else too, one of the older women who was holding a joint out with one hand and running the other over his bum but I didn’t mind. I felt generous and proud. This was my home and my party and it was the greatest thing ever.
I went upstairs to the loo and saw two people screwing on my parents’ bed and suddenly I felt sick. In the bathroom mirror I looked shameless, my little breasts bare, my face flushed, my eyes blazing horribly. I went into my room, which seemed a very childish safe room with its shelf of dolls in national dress, the posters and books, and put a T-shirt on. I went downstairs and made coffee. I felt wobbly and frightened of the drugs and sex and drunkenness. The woman still had hold of Mark and she had taken off her shirt and her breasts were very big and floppy and adult looking and Mark’s childish hand with its chewed fingernails was on one. It wasn’t all right any more and I know it was my own fault, I started it, I know.
I thought what would my parents say if they walked in now, their lovely house with its polished parquet floors full of – mostly – strangers because it was late and everyone I knew – apart from Mark – had gone home. There were all these grown-up strangers who didn’t even know it was my house, who looked down their drunken noses at me as if I was only a child.
I didn’t know how to stop it. I tried to get Mark away from the woman but he was too drunk to listen.
‘Come on Mark,’ I said. ‘I think we should be kicking people out.’
‘The night is young,’ the woman said, although the hall clock right in front of her nose showed that it was half-past two. ‘This your place?’
‘Yes, and my boyfriend,’ I said stiffly.
‘Cool,’ she said. The music was too loud and the place so smoky it was as if there was fog in the house. I
had an idea. I went into the cellar and switched off the electricity. My dad had shown me how to do this before they left in case of emergency. ‘Like what?’ I’d teased, but he was not thinking about this, I’m sure. The cellar smelt comfortingly of creosote and bicycle tyres. I stayed in the dark, lights flashing in my eyes, feeling sick, feeling as if the top of my head was coming off. I stayed underneath the feet and the grumbling and the door slamming. And then, when it was quiet, I turned the power back on and went to switch off the tape-player that had screamed back to life.
Everyone had gone except Mark who sat on the bottom stair as if he’d been shipwrecked, ‘Christ, Inis,’ he said.
‘We’ve got to clear up,’ I said.
‘Inna morning,’ he said and crawled upstairs.
I wandered around looking at the chaos and imagining how horrified my parents would be, how my mum would shriek at the cigarette burns on the hall carpet, how my dad would react to the ruined parquet. But I was too tired to do more than empty an ashtray into the overflowing kitchen bin. I went upstairs and slept beside Mark on my mum’s side of the bed.
In the morning we drank coffee and cleaned. I was outside picking up cans when the man next door stuck his head over the hedge. ‘Doug and Betty back?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Only I want to complain about that racket last night. Beverley never got a wink.’ ‘Complain to me.’ ‘Don’t you worry, young lady, soon as that car draws in I’ll be round to tell them your carryings on. We’re not blind you know, nor deaf.’ ‘Fine,’ I said, quailing inside. ‘Do.’ My head was throbbing and I felt sick every time I bent over to retrieve something. From inside I heard the roar of the vacuum cleaner.
They were due home in the early evening. Mark went home in the late afternoon. I took the washed sheets off the line, ironed them and put them back on the double bed. I shut some of the windows which had been open to let out the smell of smoke. I picked tomatoes and made a salad ready for them. I gathered some roses and only then did I notice that my mother’s favourite cut-glass vase was missing – Venetian glass, a wedding present from her grandfather. I found it smashed behind the sofa. I’d put it there to be safe. I don’t know how it got smashed. It lay on a whitened patch where the water had soaked into the parquet and dried, a mess of glittering crystal and broken lupins.
I was standing looking at it, filled with dread, thinking that it was the one thing, the one thing, Mum would really mind, that could not properly be replaced when the door-bell rang. When I saw the dark blue uniforms through the glass door I thought it was about last night, about the drugs or the noise. But it was not that.
I hope they had a good holiday. I hope they got drunk and made love every hot afternoon. I hope they walked along hand in hand like young lovers again, not the stiff English people they had grown into. I hope it was so quick they never knew what was happening.
My first thought, this is terrible to admit, but my first thought when the policewoman went to put on the kettle, to ring my aunt and ask her to come and be with me, was that I would never have to tell Mum about the vase. I felt relief.
After that grief.
And after that guilt. Somehow I felt that if I hadn’t so thoroughly and joyously lost my virginity in their bed it wouldn’t have happened, the engines failing, the plane falling, tons of it, dropping like a mountain from the sky and breaking into tiny pieces. I saw a tangle of warped metal and soft limbs, like the glass and the petals. If I hadn’t had the party … if I hadn’t let those people defile their house … I felt sick of myself, sick with guilt. And I should have been with them on that plane. I should have been dead too.
Bonny had known. Earlier in the afternoon I’d tried to take her to the baker’s with me, she wouldn’t come. Usually when anyone went near her lead that hung on a hook by the kitchen door, she’d whimper and frisk her stiff old body about, but this time she shrunk away. She went and lay on the hall floor outside my parents’ bedroom door, her nose hidden under her paws, crying, trembling. I was too busy cleaning to take much notice. But of course, she knew.
PIGEON PAIR
Sometimes when I looked in the mirror I saw a boy. I believe this was before I even knew there was a boy. I cannot be quite sure about that, of course. At eighty-four, I find, the memory will play such tricks. I hate it. But I am swept along. I remember things I could never have done … I say I could never have done but … oh how I ramble. One thing at a time. About the boy.
As a child I felt unwanted. That is a hard thing to say, but true. They were cruel to me. Mother with her punishment. Father with his.
Sometimes when Mother gave me the Reflective Punishment, which is what she called it, even when I was so small I had to stand on a chair to see myself in the mirror, my eyes would play tricks. They would tire with staring at the surface of the glass and sink through, focus back far inside the mirror as if it was a deep pool of light, focus past the reflection of door, wallpaper, ceiling rose and pale girl’s face to discover a swimmy picture of a familiar boy. Familiar because he looked like family. He looked like me, or like I might have looked if I’d been a boy. I saw him for years. I liked seeing him. On those occasions I didn’t faint. If I saw him the punishment wasn’t so bad. It was as if I got a sort of comfort from his presence, as if something inside me relaxed, a sense of completion. I didn’t think that then, of course, it was only that I felt happy, as if a little bubble had expanded in my chest.
Anyway, I never asked Mother or Father about the boy in the mirror. We hardly talked about the punishment at all. It was quite by chance that I learned about the boy. I often used to sit on the window-sill in the sitting-room, a wooden space, wide enough for me to sit with my knees drawn up to my chin if I moved the china vase. In winter I would sit behind the brown velvet curtain. I won’t say I was hiding, though I was hidden. I didn’t think they liked me to sit with them and I didn’t like to anyway. When the fire was lit the room got stuffy, I didn’t like the heat, it made me breathless. Behind the curtain was a slice of cold air. I leant my cheek against the cold window-glass and watched the condensation trickle down. Sometimes in the winter there were frosty ferns and feather faces peeping through.
Once I was there – I think Mother had forgotten me – and Father came in for his tea. They were talking. I was barely listening, my mind elsewhere, watching the black hole my breath melted in the frost, squinting through it into the silver and dark fuzz of the garden, when I heard Father say ‘… if the boy had lived.’
‘There’s no use harking on at that again,’ Mother said. I tried to rush my memory back to what else Father had said, but it was not there in my mind and anyway now I prickled with questions. Boy? What boy? I knew if I came out then I would be in trouble, they would say I was a sneaking eavesdropper but I did not care. I wanted to know so badly.
I must have been very young not to have been more afraid. I know I was young because I remember my feet didn’t touch the floor, my heels banged against the skirting-board and then the vase smashed. I don’t know how, maybe the hem of my dress caught it. I don’t know, but I’m sure it was an accident. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, opening a flap in the curtains through which my fire-lit parents’ faces burned. My mouth opened in a balloon of panic, and then the vase smashed. It smashed in sharp, curved pieces and there was the stench of rotten flower water and broken chrysanthemums, petals scattered, slimy stalks. The curtain was whipped back and my cheek was stung by the hard flat of a hand. I was wrenched into the hot light of the room, I was slapped again, I was pushed and I fell. My head hit the hearth.
I remember nothing more until I woke up in my own bed. The first thing I saw was a vase of flowers on the window-sill, a different vase of course, and different flowers but still they hurled the memory back into my aching head.
Mother came into the room then and stood against the light so that she was as dark and flat as a shadow except for the frizz of escaped hairs round her brow.
‘Woken up then,’ she said. She leant over and became p
ink and round. She kissed me. I breathed her cool, lily-of-the-valley scent. She held my hand. ‘You had us worried,’ she said, ‘falling like that. You must be more careful.’ I tried to lift my head off the pillow but it was heavy and my neck hurt as well as the place on my temple where I had bashed it. Mother sat on the edge of the bed. ‘You clumsy darling,’ she said and stroked my hand. I liked it when she was like that, like a mother who loved me.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Least said: soonest mended.’ She looked down at me and her eyes shone like wet pebbles in the sun. I wanted to ask her about what Father had said but I was scared it would make her angry, make her eyes go dry and hard, make her leave the room. But I had to know about the boy. You could never tell with Mother whether she might not be soft and open because sometimes she was. Sometimes she really was a good kind mother.
I held my breath and dared. ‘I heard Father say,’ I began, ‘I heard him say about a boy.’ Her eyes stayed bright. She stroked the palm of my hand with her thumb over and over. I saw that she was not angry but sad. She sighed, opened her mouth and closed it again.
‘What, Mother?’
She breathed in and her nostrils fluttered like little dark moth’s wings. ‘You were born a twin,’ she said finally. ‘Two of you, two babies, first a boy – the boy your father wanted, and then you, the girl. A pigeon pair.’
‘So, so I had a brother …’ I struggled to sit up but my head was as heavy as if it had been nailed to the bed.
‘Benjamin Charles,’ she said. ‘Benjamin Charles came first but Benjamin Charles was born dead. And then you. They took him away, tried to revive him. Alone I gave birth to you. And how you yelled!’ I could not tell what her smile meant. ‘How you yelled and flailed. Nothing wrong with you. But all the time, Benjamin Charles was dead.’ She gazed out of the window and I looked too but there was nothing to see, only grubby clouds. Only the wobbly black M of a bird.
The Private Parts of Women Page 3
