Human Croquet (8 page)

I poke around half-heartedly amongst the detritus and debris that composes Vinny’s soft furnishings. I swing open one of the heavy doors of the wardrobe, taking extra caution in case the whole contraption topples over and crushes me. Vinny’s wardrobe, once the Widow’s, is a curious affair. ‘A Compendium’ it announces itself in a stylized script from some time before the First World War. A ‘Lady’s Compendium’ in fact, because there was once a matching ‘Gentleman’s Compendium’ that belonged to my long-forgotten grandfather – ‘my late father’ as Vinny says, her intonation suggesting unpunctuality rather than deadness.

Vinny’s wardrobe displays its sex boldly – shelves labelled
Lingerie, Scarves, Gloves, Sundries
and racks designated
Furs, Evening Wear, Day Dresses
.

Despite the amount of Vinny’s clothing hanging on the bedstead (or, indeed, the amount hanging on the floor), the wardrobe itself contains a forest of clothes, clothes that I’ve never even seen Vinny wear. Until now I’ve only had the most cursory of glimpses into the reeking camphor insides of Vinny’s wardrobe and I’m gripped by a strange fascination and can’t help but finger the ancient crêpe day dresses, hanging limp and lifeless, and stroke the musty wool costumes and coatees that are evidence of a more stylish Vinny than the one that now snails around the house in dusty print overall and fur-lined, zippered slippers. Was Vinny young once? It’s hard to imagine it.

A long fur coat of uncertain animal insists on being fondled and a tippet brushes itself eagerly against my fingertips. The tippet’s made from a long-dead pair of foxes, unacquainted in life but now for ever joined as intimately as Siamese twins. Their little triangular faces peer out from the dark depths of the wardrobe, their black bead eyes staring hopefully at me while their sharp little snouts sniff the fusty air. (How do they spend their time? Dreaming of unspoilt forests?) I rescue them and place them around my shoulders where they nestle gratefully, protecting me from the draughts that whirl around the room like major weather fronts.

Crammed into the bottom of the wardrobe is a stack of boxes – shoe-boxes like cat coffins, grey with dust, their ends labelled with black-and-white line drawings of shoes that have names
(Claribel, Dulcie, Sonia)
and hat-boxes, some leather, some cardboard. In the shoe-boxes are many different kinds of footwear – a pair of cream sandals, stout enough for an English summer, a pair of patent black T-straps, itching to dance a Charleston. But no sign of the errant brown brogues.

A plaintive screeching from the foot of the stairs indicates that Vinny is growing impatient. Just then, I spy a stray shoe lurking at the very bottom of the wardrobe, a partnerless one – but definitely not Vinny’s or the Widow’s style. A high-heeled brown suede shoe with a strange piece of matted fur stuck to it, like a piece of dead cat. The inside of the shoe’s spotted with mould and a rhinestone glistens from within the little nest of dead fur. The nap on it is dark and rough and the thin heel of the shoe is splayed at an angle like a tooth waiting to fall out.

The smell of sadness which has drifted at my back into Vinny’s room, is suddenly overwhelming, enveloping me like a damp cloak and I feel quite queasy with misery.

Vinny’s squawks are growing louder, is she going to have to go barefoot to the hospital? What am I
doing
up there? Have I climbed into the wardrobe and
disappeared
?

Hurriedly, I take the shoe and close the wardrobe door and, as I turn away, notice Vinny’s brown brogues sitting amongst the clutter of her dressing-table, their tongues silent. Vinny, on the other hand, has reached a critical level and if she shrieks any louder will explode.

We know, in our bones and our blood, that the shoe has travelled through time and space to tell us something. But what? If we found its partner would it help us find the true bride (‘it fits, it fits!’) and bring her back from wherever she is now?

‘She could be dead for all we know, Charles.’ Charles looks as if he’d like to attack me with the shoe. ‘Don’t you ever think about her?’ he says angrily.

But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about her. I carry Eliza around inside me, like a bowl of emptiness. There is nothing to fill it, only unanswered questions. What was her favourite colour? Did she have a sweet tooth? Was she a good dancer? Was she afraid of death? Do I have diseases I will inherit from her? Will I sew a straight seam or play a good hand at bridge because of her?

I have no pattern for womanhood – other than that provided by Vinny and Debbie and no-one could call them good models. There are things I don’t know about – good skin care, how to write a thank-you letter – because she was never there to teach me. More important things – how to be a wife, how to be a mother. How to be a woman. If only I didn’t have to keep on inventing Eliza (rook-hair, milk-skin, blood-lips). ‘No, hardly ever,’ I lie to Charles in an off-hand way, ‘it was such a long time ago. We have to move on with our lives, you know.’ (But where to?)

Perhaps she’s coming back in bits – a drift of perfume, a powder-compact, a shoe. Perhaps soon there’ll be fingernails and hair, and then whole limbs will start to appear and we can piece our jigsaw-mother together again.

Mr Baxter’s hair has been newly cut in an army crop that bristles angrily from his scalp. Mrs Baxter’s hair, on the other hand, is softly waved and the colour of small timid mammals. There’s nothing harsh about Mrs Baxter. She favours neutral colours – oyster, taupe, biscuit and oatmeal – so that sometimes she just seems to fade right away into her pretty, chintzy living-room with its well-behaved curtain tie-backs and orderly teak display-unit. This is better than Vinny who wears funereal shades as if she’s in permanent mourning for something. Her life, according to Debbie, who’s more of a pastel person herself.

At the unexpected sight of Mr Baxter, Charles says, ‘Right, I’m off then, I’m going to the cinema,’ and before Debbie can say, ‘Oh no you aren’t!’ he’s gone. Poor Charles, he can never find anyone to go anywhere with him. ‘He should get a dog,’ Carmen suggests – the McDades have a pack of assorted dogs for every purpose – ‘a dog would go anywhere with him.’ But Charles wants someone who’ll sit in the back row of the cinema with him, someone to rendezvous with in cafés and drink frothy coffee and eat toasted teacakes, and although a dog would probably be perfectly willing to undertake these duties I think it’s a girl, not a canine, that Charles wants. (‘Hmm,’ Carmen says, frowning, ‘that’s a bit more difficult.’) Why don’t girls want to go out with Charles – because he looks so odd? Because he has strange beliefs and obsessions? Yes. In a word.

Mrs Baxter, unsure of the etiquette of something as novel as a barbecue, has brought a large Tupperware bowl with her which she proffers to Debbie. ‘I just made a wee bitty coleslaw,’ she says with a hopeful smile, ‘thought you might be able to use it.’

‘Or even eat it,’ Mr Baxter says with a sarcastic smile so that Mrs Baxter grows flustered.

More neighbours begin to troop into the garden and Debbie grows increasingly edgy about her unglowing coals. The neighbours are suitably impressed by Debbie’s barbecue grill – ‘very new-fangled’ – but less impressed by their uncooked food.

Mr and Mrs Primrose arrive with Eunice and Richard, Eunice’s unattractive brother. Mr Primrose and Debbie fall into an earnest conversation about The Lythe Players’ next production – A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which they’re going to perform (‘just for the heck of it,’ Mr Primrose laughs) on Midsummer’s Eve in the Lady Oak field. Why on Midsummer’s Eve? Why not on Midsummer’s Night? ‘As if it matters,’ Debbie says dismissively.

Debbie has a speaking-part at last, playing Helena, and is constantly complaining about the number of words she has to learn, not to mention the awkwardness of those words, ‘He [meaning Shakespeare] could have made the whole thing a lot shorter in my opinion, and he uses twenty words when one would do, it’s ridiculous. Words, words, words.’

I don’t bother entering into an argument with her, or explaining that Shakespeare is beyond all possible measure. (‘Unusual’, Miss Hallam the English teacher says, ‘in a girl of your age to find such enthusiasm for the Bard.’) The ‘Bard’! This is like calling Eliza ‘our mum’, bringing them down to the level of ordinary mortals. ‘If anyone came from another planet,’ I tell Charles, ‘then it was Shakespeare.’ Imagine meeting Shakespeare! But then what would you say to him? What would you
do
with him? You could hardly take him around the shops. (Or maybe you could.) ‘Have sex,’ Carmen says, sticking her tongue into a sherbet fountain in a vaguely obscene way. ‘Sex?’ I query doubtfully.

‘Well, you may as well,’ she shrugs, ‘if you’re going to go to all the bother of time-travel.’

‘The who?’

‘The Lovats. On Laurel Bank. He’s your gynaecologist.’

Debbie gives a little shudder of horror. ‘Why on earth would I want to invite him? He’d be standing there, eating a steak, and knowing what I look like
inside.’
An unsettling thought. But he’d be exceptional if he was eating a steak, no-one else is.

Faced, as he is, with so much ‘women’s trouble’ (especially such ‘women’ as Debbie and Vinny), one might feel almost sorry for Mr Lovat – but he is not a particularly nice person – ‘a cold fish’ in Debbie’s estimation, a ‘queer fish’ in Vinny’s – so an unusual consensus there from the warring-parties, about the fish part anyway.

Debbie has made dessert for the occasion – a sophisticated moulded concoction,
Riz Imperial aux Peches
. ‘Cold rice pudding?’ Mrs Primrose ventures doubtfully. ‘With tinned peaches?’

Mr Rice reappears just in time for Richard Primrose to snigger, a horrible kind of
snarf-snarf
noise, and say, ‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Semolina!’

I tell him this is an old joke, but Richard isn’t interested in anything a girl
says
. Mr Rice
is
beginning to look like a pudding, now I think about it, a stodgy suet rolypoly one, with his pasty skin and currant eyes. Richard himself would make a very poor pudding. He’s a bespectacled and bespotted youth the same age as Charles and a first-year student of Civil Engineering at the Glebelands Technical College. Richard and Charles have several things in common – they are both equally potholed with acne and subject to a similar red-raw shaving rash. They both also smell faintly of old cheese rinds, although this is possibly true of all boys (except Malcolm Lovat, of course), and they both have a geekish, unsocialized quality which alienates them from both girls and their male peers. Despite their similarities they detest each other.

There are some things they don’t share, however. Charles, for instance, is human (despite what he likes to think to the contrary) but Richard is possibly not. Possibly an extra-terrestrial experiment gone wrong in fact – an alien’s idea of what a human is like, put together from spare parts, the creation of a Martian Frankenstein.

He’s the complete physical opposite of Charles, thin and lanky as a vine, his body dangling from his big coathanger-shoulders like an ill-fitting suit. Lantern-jawed, in profile his face is a concave new moon.

Richard keeps trying to make sly physical contact with me, shooting out a surreptitious hand or foot and trying to rub them against whatever bit of my body he can reach. ‘Sod off, Richard,’ I say nastily to him and stalk off.

‘And this is?’ Mrs Baxter says warily to me, holding up a collop of singed flesh.

‘Poodle?’ I offer hopefully.

‘I think I might go home, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says hastily. ‘I should get back to Audrey.’ Audrey is still harbouring ‘Some kind of bug, summer flu,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘probably.’ Whenever she refers to Audrey’s ‘bug’ I imagine poor Audrey playing host to some giant lady-bird or shining iridescent beetle. ‘What’s
wrong
with Audrey?’ Eunice asks, annoyed at a mystery that her
click-click-click
brain can’t solve.

I wander disconsolately round the garden, the smell of sadness trailing at my heels – April’s perfume hasn’t been burnt up in the heat of June and lingers as a slight vibration in the air. Aren’t ghosts supposed to squeak and gibber? What is it? Who is it? I can feel its invisible eyes on me, perhaps it’s a manifestation of my adolescent energy, a mysterious poltergeist. If only Malcolm Lovat was here instead, following me around. I wish to go by Carterhaugh, to kilt up my skirts, forfeit the fee of my maidenhead and walk on the wild shores of sexual passion.

‘I saw you this morning,’ Eunice says, appearing at my side, a bloody smear of tomato ketchup on her face. ‘Pretty terrible barbecue,’ she says cheerfully, ‘I could have made a much better job of it.’

‘Where?’

‘Where what?’

‘Where did you see me this morning?’

‘In Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix, you ignored me when I waved at you.’

But I wasn’t in Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix or anywhere else, I was in my bed, dreaming about Malcolm Lovat’s head. ‘Maybe it was your double then,’ Eunice shrugs, ‘your
doppelgänger.’
My self from the parallel world? Imagine if you were to come around a corner of the world and meet yourself – what questions you could ask! ‘Do you have this odd feeling, Eunice?’

‘Odd?’

‘Yeah, as if something’s not quite right …’ But then the barbecue bursts into flames and the heavens open in an attempt to quench the fire and the social gathering comes to a wet and sooty halt.