Behind the Scenes at the Museum (32 page)

Edmund floated down, feeling light-headed, almost euphoric, and found himself dreamily reciting poetry to himself.
Repaire me now, for mine end doth haste. I runne to death, and death meets me as fast
. The frozen fields below were glazed blue in the moonlight. Edmund had just a moment to consider how beautiful the world was before he went crashing through the tops of a copse of snow-laden fir-trees and into a deep, cold snowdrift.

Doreen O’Doherty only found out about Sergeant Eddie Donner’s death six weeks later when she tried to get a message to him through his station commander. Doreen cried herself to sleep that night. The station commander had been very nice to her on the phone when he said the crew had been lost (although in fact Morris Dighty was picked up and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp and is now retired and spends a lot of time on his allotment), and for a moment she’d wanted to confide in him, but then there wasn’t much he’d be able to do. Doreen had only been with Edmund twice and couldn’t really remember what he looked like at all, apart from what everyone remembered – the blond curls and the blue eyes. She could remember, however, how strong he felt when he held her and she could remember what his soft skin smelt like, a strange perfume of carbolic, tobacco and grass, and it did seem truly terrible that someone who had been so alive should now be dead and even more terrible that she should be carrying his child, and then she cried even more because she felt so sorry for herself. When the baby was born, Doreen O’Doherty had it adopted and moved to Leeds where she married a council workman called Reg Collier and found she couldn’t have any more children.

‘Don’t you like it?’ she says, swivelling her head round just like the Parrot used to. Her tone of voice indicates that she hasn’t the faintest interest in whether George likes it or not. She conjures a pair of shoes from nowhere. ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ They’re wickedly narrow with long stiletto heels, in the same shade of green as the hat. You know from looking at them that they’ll be worn once and never again. She crams a foot into one of her new shoes with all the determination of an ugly sister. ‘You could cut your toes off,’ I suggest helpfully.

The number of as yet unplundered bags at Bunty’s feet implies that she might have been buying things to wear in between the extremities of hat and shoes. She wrestles with a particularly large Leak and Thorp’s bag – ‘And . . .’ Bunty says, like a magician’s assistant, ‘Ta-ra!’ and produces a matching dress and coat in a slightly darker shade of soupy pea-green, in a heavy, artificial shot-silk. ‘Why?’ George asks with a pained look on his face.

‘For the wedding, of course,’ Bunty holds up the dress against herself, in a sitting position, like an invalid. She turns to me, ‘What do you think?’

I sigh and shake my head in envy and longing, ‘It’s lovely.’ (Extracts from Ruby Lennox’s school report, summer term, 1966 –
Ruby has a real talent for acting . . . Ruby was the star of the school play
.)

‘The wedding?’ George is thoroughly baffled now. ‘Whose wedding?’

‘Ted’s, of course, Ted and Sandra’s.’

‘Ted?’

‘Yes, Ted. My brother,’ she adds helpfully as George stares blankly at her. ‘Ted and Sandra. Their wedding’s on Saturday – don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’

‘
This
Saturday?’ George seems to be having a mild apoplectic fit. ‘But . . .’ he splutters and flounders, ‘they can’t get married this Saturday – it’s the World Cup Final!’

‘So?’ Bunty says, weighting the one little syllable with a heavy mixed cargo of disdain, indifference and wilful misunderstanding, not to mention twenty years of marital antipathy. Even a Mandarin-speaking Chinaman would be floored by the subtleties of Bunty’s intonation.

George is stunned. ‘So?’ he repeats, staring at her as if she’d just grown a second head. ‘
So
?’

This could go on for ever. I cough politely, ‘Ahem.’

‘Have you got a cough?’ Bunty asks accusingly.

‘No, it’s just I have to get back to school . . .’ It’s a Monday lunchtime and Janice Potter has persuaded me to sign out with her (you can only leave school in pairs and you’re supposed to stick like glue to each other in case you’re raped, robbed or lost), so she can go to the Museum Gardens to smoke and snog with her boyfriend. Cast adrift at the gates, I have washed up at the Shop.

Bunty suddenly drops her bags and leaps from the wheelchair like a Lourdes miracle and says ‘Mind the Shop!’ to me and hustles a hapless George out to help her ‘choose’ (that is, pay for) a wedding present for Ted and Sandra.

And so, here I am, abandoned to mind the Shop – sometimes I feel like Bunty, a discomfiting thought, to say the least. Will I turn out like my mother? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? I’m fourteen and already I’ve ‘had enough’. Bunty was nearly twice my age before she started saying that. I’m an only child now with all the advantages (money, clothes, records) and all the disadvantages (loneliness, isolation, anguish). I’m all they’ve got left, a ruby solitaire, a kind of chemical reduction of all their children. Bunty still has to run through all our names until she reaches mine – ‘Patricia, Gillian, P—Ruby, what’s your name?’ Luckily, I now know that all mothers do this as soon as they have more than one child – Mrs Gorman, Kathleen’s mother, has to run through an astonishing litany of children –
Billy-Michael-Doreen-Patrick-Frances-Joe
– before she arrives at ‘Kathleen-or-whatever-your-name-is.’

Being a Monday, business is slack so I occupy my time by deputizing for one of Bunty’s prime functions – wrapping the Durex. I take up my position by the huge roll of brown paper that’s bolted on to the wall behind the counter and patiently pull and rip, pull and rip, until I’ve got a good supply of big square pieces. Then I take the pair of ‘Nurses’ Surgical Steel Scissors – Best Quality’ that are chained to the counter and set about cutting up the big squares into smaller squares, like a particularly dull
Blue Peter
demonstration. When I’ve done that I get out a new box of Gossamer from the storeroom at the back (which was once the dining-room) and wrap the individual packets of three, neatly folding and sellotaping each end of the little brown paper envelopes. Now the Durex can be handed over like gifts (‘Here’s one I prepared earlier’), rapidly and discreetly, to our valued customers. Not by me, of course. I have not yet managed to sell one packet while I’ve been left in charge of the Shop; noone seems keen to buy their rubber johnnies (‘A planned family is a happy family’) from a fourteen-year-old child, and when they charge into the shop, change at the ready, and see me, their eyes immediately shift to the nearest likely object and they shuffle out in dissatisfaction, clutching a packet of corn plasters or a pair of nail-clippers, and in this way I am probably personally responsible for a great many unplanned families.

I have wrapped an entire gross box of Durex and still they’re not back. How long does it take to choose a present? Perhaps they’ve run away from home. I slump disconsolately into an electric wheelchair and push the control stick to ‘Slow – forward’ and trundle round the Shop pretending to be a Dalek,
I am a Dalek I am a Dalek
. For my Dalek gun, I use the dismembered dummy leg that models an Elastanet two-way stretch stocking and exterminate a stand of male urinals, a shelf of Dol’s Flannel and two miniature Bakelite torsos, one male, one female, who face each other across the Shop – Greek and mutely tragic – displaying their little surgical corsets to each other.

Restoring the male urinals to their former positions – balanced on top of each other like a circus tightrope act (‘And now the fantastic, death-defying, one-and-only Male Urinals!’) – I think about how I miss the Pets. For one thing, they were a less embarrassing stock to carry. It’s not just the contraceptives – the Durex, the mysterious jellies and foams and the Dutch caps – there’s a high snigger factor to nearly everything we carry. The glass counter is full of jock straps and incontinence pads; there’s a shelf full of prosthetic breasts like small conical sandbags, another of trusses that look more like something you’d put on a horse; then there are the colostomy bags and this month’s special offer is on rubber sheeting, thick red stuff that George cuts from a heavy roll that smells like car tyres. They might have given some thought to the effect that this has on my social life. (‘And what exactly do your parents sell, Ruby?’)

I even miss the Parrot. It’s hard to believe that this is the same Shop it was before the fire. I often go upstairs, into the empty rooms where we once lived, and try to call the past back. Above the Shop has fallen into a rapid decay – it’s never really been put back to rights since the fire. Whitewash balloons off the ceiling where Patricia once slept and the bedroom I shared with Gillian has an odd smell in it, the aroma of something decaying, like a dead rat concealed behind the wainscot. It seems now as if Above the Shop was just a trick of lath and plaster and light – and yet sometimes, if I stand on the stairs and close my eyes, I can hear the voices of the household ghosts being carried hither and thither on a current of air. Do they miss us, I wonder?

Sometimes I think I hear the Parrot, a ghostly squawk echoing around the Shop. Sometimes I think I can hear it on the other end of the telephone, all the way out in Acomb. We don’t only have telephone calls from spectral parrots, we also have calls from nobody at all, a mute phantom phoner who manifests himself as crackling static down the wires. When George answers these silent calls, he stares for a few seconds at the receiver as if it personally was to blame and then slaps it back down in the cradle and walks off in disgust. Bunty persists a little longer, trying to coax a response by repeating her normal phone greeting, ‘Hello, this is the Lennox residence, Bunty Lennox speaking, how can I help you?’ which is enough to put off all but the most determined caller and our poor spook is anything but robust. ‘Mr Nobody again,’ Bunty says, as if he was a personal friend.

But when I answer, I hang on for the longest time, waiting and hoping for a message. I’m sure it’s Patricia on the other end of the phone – we haven’t heard from her for well over a year and surely she’ll be in touch soon. ‘Patricia? Patricia?’ I whisper urgently into the receiver, but if it is her, she doesn’t answer. Your sister says not to worry would do (see
Footnote (
x
)
). Bunty must still expect Patricia home because she has left her room untouched, and as Patricia was not the tidiest of girls and her room was always littered with dirty clothing and food crumbs, it has by now taken on a Miss Havisham-air of decay and will probably soon revert to primordial slime.

Perhaps it isn’t Patricia at all, but our Gillian, wandering in limbo and trying to phone home. But can spirits make telephone calls? Are there call-boxes beyond the veil? Do you need a coin or could she reverse the charges? Is it somebody else entirely? Perhaps I’ll be able to corner Daisy and Rose at the wedding and get some satisfactory answers to these questions.

‘Shop!’ George says perfunctorily. ‘There!’ Bunty says, very pleased with herself as she winkles a china figure out of its box – a woman in a crinoline. ‘It’s called “The Crinoline Lady”,’ Bunty says, turning it this way and that to examine its porcelain flounces. George snorts, ‘It looks like a toilet-roll holder.’

‘That’s exactly the kind of remark I would expect from you,’ Bunty says, putting the offended Crinoline Lady back in her box. ‘And you need a new tie for this wedding, in fact you can come out with me now and choose one.’

‘No!’ I wail, struggling back into blazer and beret, ‘I have to get back to school.’ The afternoon bell will have gone by now (
Late again, Ruby?
). George looks at me. ‘Are you going to this wedding?’ he asks suddenly.

‘
Oh, for heaven’s sakes!
’ Bunty says, her eyebrows taking off in exasperation. ‘She’s the
bridesmaid
!’

‘You?’ George says incredulously.

‘Me,’ I confirm with a helpless shrug of the shoulders. I’m not insulted by his disbelief, I’m even more amazed than he is.