Living In Perhaps (16 page)

'OK.' I reached out one hand, casual too, and Tom crouched
nearer to me in the darkness, holding up a match. I discovered it
was an intimate thing, having a cigarette lit for you. Tom's unsettling
nearness. That expert hand almost cradling mine.

'You're supposed to breathe in,' he said. Not very kindly.

It was like smoking a hot, flaming worm. I thought I must have
seared my throat. There was no taste to it except heat, and then
smoke. I did my utmost not to cough, and then dragged some air
into my lungs, and leaned my head forward, hair over my face,
while the tears popped into my eyes. I heard Tom's quiet, snickering
little laugh.

Barbara climbed out of her bed and went indoors, coming back
with the water bottle, which she passed around. She had filled it
with lime cordial. My throat felt as if it had been ripped, and the
cordial stung all the way down. She and Tom finished their
cigarettes pensively, blowing out smoke into the cool darkness.

And then Tillie was walking over the grass again, materializing
out of the night, barefoot, rubbing the backs of her arms. She
didn't climb up on to the veranda but stood on the bare earth
beneath it and reached through the railing for her empty glass
and her tobacco tin, and saying, 'Don't stay awake too long, my
doves,' walked towards the back of the house.

I thought I had found the ultimate happy family.

Some time later, half asleep, I heard Patrick come back, his
footsteps heavy, and at least two others with him, making no
attempt to keep quiet. The front door banged shut, lights flared all
over the downstairs. Someone went into the kitchen, opening
cupboard doors and calling out. They settled in the front room,
although the other lights stayed on. I could hear the voices,
Patrick's, another man's, a woman's with a throaty laugh, and now
and then a half-sentence loud and clear: 'Lucky if she wants to ...',
'Not if it was to save your life ...', 'Thinks he's bloody Cézanne!',
'I care, and then I don't care ...' I lay there, frowning in the darkness,
frowning with the effort of making these patchwork phrases
into something that meant something.

Later, much later, just as the birds in the woods started singing,
I woke to hear Tillie's voice high up like a roosting bird herself,
shushing Mattie who was wailing and protesting over something.
'Nah – nah – nah!' his voice went on, thin and peevish. 'Oh,
Mattie, Mattie, Mattie, my little Mattie,' she said, almost singing.
Whether he shut up or whether I fell asleep again first I couldn't
tell.

Of course, I had to get up and out by eight o'clock, make my
way over the dew-wet fields and right around to Fairwith Avenue,
where I hung about behind the hedges until I saw my father's car
come crawling along, and I jumped out at him from the driveway
of number fifteen, waving enthusiastically, before he could do
anything as silly as walk up to the white front door.

Roy Tiltyard had moved in with Bettina, into the flat above
Charisse. Bettina continued to cut and curl hair all day long, and
Roy did some work in a light industrial place out along the coast
road. No one knew what. It seemed to me that men's work when
they were out of the home was literally unmentionable. What was
it that they did all day? There are no names for it that mean anything.
Unless they did something specific, like Wally, who drove a
van. There again, it
seems
clear, but it isn't specific enough. Drove
what kind of a van, filled with what, and for whom? An ice-cream
van, a delivery van, a removals van? And Eddy, in the Merchant
Navy, and Tom Rose's father, dead at sea – what was it they were
doing? Did they haul sails and wrestle with the helm, sit at a table
with radio dials in front of them and headphones over their ears,
or pace the bridge and give instructions down a tube? You only
got a hint of these things from films. What men might be up to in
the oh-so-important world of work.

We all knew perfectly well what it was that women did. We
could see them every day, indoors and out, scouring, scrubbing,
plumping, patting, slopping and slicing. You had only to glance
out of the nets to see Mrs Smith sweeping her front step and Mrs
Jones hanging her Persil-white washing and Mrs Brown polishing
her windows to a crystal sheen. You could see them from buses
and trains doing much the same, or carrying string bags full of
shopping or pushing babies in prams or waiting to collect their
mixed infants at the school gate. Even those who worked (the
other was not
work
, just housework) were clearly visible to
the human eye: cutting hair, swabbing out the school lavs, sticking
a needle in your arm and saying, 'This won't hurt,' or pressing
the keys of cash registers in shops across the land. Even me,
eventually, leaning on my counter-top at the dry cleaner's in the
long stretches between customers. What I did was open for all to
see, there was no mystery involved. Anyone could have done it. A
trained dog could have done it. Though not the safety pins, I
think.

Patrick, who was productive enough – I knew what he did and
I even saw some of the results – worked at home when he wasn't
teaching, and yet it seemed like play. He could saw wood and
stretch canvas and make sketches surrounded by the riot and
noise of his children and family and friends. When he could bear
them no longer he could shut himself away in the attic, with all
the windows open and music playing loudly, and still get his work
done. But the very same circumstances had stopped Tillie doing
the same work, had stopped her for years.

'She doesn't have time to do any painting,' Barbara explained to
me.

'I don't get enough time. Time to paint. Not proper time,' Tillie
said to me, later the same day. She leaned over the table towards
me, pushing aside half-full cups and damp tea towels. 'You see,
Carolina, I only have little wedges, little potato chips of time,
sliced off the whole big proper thing. It's not enough.'

Which was bizarre in view of the fact that later I saw Tillie
sitting on the back step in her usual position, chin on knees and
arms around shins, doing nothing. Well, she was painting her toenails
with Barbara's metallic blue nail varnish, and smoking a
cigarette. She wasn't doing
absolutely
nothing. But in that household,
in terms of inertia, it was as good as you were going to get.

*

I learned later that it was the kitchen Barbara was anxious for
Tillie to paint. It was a dark and dirty pear-leaf green, had been all
the time they lived there, according to Barbara, and she wanted it
redecorated like the Van Hoogs' kitchen, fresh and yellow and
glinting with light. She had even picked out a colour – 'Daffodil'
– from a paint chart.

'I'll get round to doing it some day,' Tillie promised gaily, picking
up a basket of washing to peg out on the line. 'But I like my
house. I
love
my house. I'm perfectly content with it as it is.'

She paused in the back doorway, looking around. Her feet were
bare and she wore terrible cut-off drainpipe jeans which made her
look like Tom the Cabin Boy.

'You wouldn't want it all tidy and prissy and
clean
,' she told
Barbara, and then ran off down the wooden steps. We heard her
call back over her shoulder: 'In those sort of houses you can't do
as you like, and you
always
do as you like.'

The Hennessys didn't have a scrap of wallpaper anywhere in
their house, no cabbage roses, no twining ivy or limp bamboo.
Their walls were painted, a plain backdrop to the pictures and the
unmatched furniture. And I liked it, I found it restful. But I know
what my mother would have said if she could have seen it: 'They
should be ashamed of themselves. Chipped gloss paint, and finger
marks everywhere. And I'd throw out that dreadful old junk they
call furniture, if it was up to me. Not even antique. It's not as if
they don't know any better. They know all right, they're just the
sort that don't care.'

Bettina was a changed woman. She had always had a tendency
towards plumpness, a generosity about the calves, a flapping of
flesh on the upper arms. During her time as a fiancée she began
to bulge, to melt and overflow, like warm ice cream squeezed
between two wafers. Now that she was a married woman she
inflated, a hot air balloon serenely wafting above the unimportant
crowd. We all hoped, secretly, that Roy Tiltyard liked 'em big. He'd
have to.

Mandy remained small and thin. When she was twelve, Gloria
said, 'She'll start growing soon. She'll flesh out.' A horrible image,
to my mind. She didn't. She stayed like a small wizened unhappy
doll, while her mother blossomed and billowed. But she grew
quieter. She lost her bully's confidence. Perhaps she'd got to the
stage where little-girl tricks didn't work any more, but hadn't yet
lighted upon any other techniques to replace them.

I had imagined that now Mandy was the child of two married
parents there would be no reason for other people to cosset and
spoil her. Surely she was no longer at a disadvantage? Everyone
else had two parents, and had to put up with the situation, no
excuses made. But the customers at Charisse still apparently saw
her as a deserving case, a pathetic little mite, and when Bettina
wasn't looking they buffed up already shining sixpences and
shilling pieces and pushed them into her hand, muttering, 'Put
that in your piggy bank, darlin',' or 'Get yourself some sweets,' as
if her entire nourishment depended on them.

Which set me to thinking that maybe there was something they
knew that I didn't know about Roy Tiltyard. Or about marriage.

I had my hair cut at Charisse now. I was able to observe these
things. When I was little, Bettina had always cut my hair on one
of her Saturday afternoon visits, making me perch on a kitchen
chair with a box on it to raise me up to the right height. She
brought her hairdressing scissors, and asked Mum for an old
towel to drape over my shoulders. She damped my hair with
water sprayed from a plastic squeezy bottle, mysteriously smelling
of the hairdressing salon. And she and my mother would chat idly
over my head, while I sat, as still as I could manage, trance-like,
without even a mirror to gaze into. I could see why Mandy hadn't
minded hanging round the salon. It was addictive stuff, even in
the kind of enigma code they used because I was there.

'Poor old Gloria ...'Bettina would start. 'That Eddy. Honestly.'

'Poor Gloria,' my mother would intone. And so it went on, a
steady slow game of throw and catch.

'How she puts up with it.'

'She's too ...'

'That Eddy.'

'... put upon.'

'I know.'

'All these years. You'd think—'

'I know.'

'
I
don't know.'

'
I
wouldn't.'

'Honestly.'

'Catch
me
.'

Like an iceberg, so much more unsaid than said.

'How's Stell?' Bettina would ask.

'She's all right.'

'Haven't seen her in a while.'

'She's well.'

'New man?'

'Nn-nn.'

'Could do with one. That Wally.' Or that Gerald, that Dimitri.
'Wouldn't touch him with a bargepole, myself.'

My mother would laugh. 'She needs to settle down.'

'Suppose she can't afford to be choosy ...'

'Find a nice man.'

'... not at her age.'

'Mmm.'

Maybe they thought I couldn't hear, that being a child somehow
sealed up my ears to adult conversation. I'm sure they
believed it made my mind too slow to understand what they were
on about. Which was usually their specialist subject: M-E-N.

I wanted to grow my hair long, and my mother wanted me to
have it short. The compromise was somewhere between the two.
Bettina cut my fringe halfway down my forehead and halfway
round my head, like a Plantagenet king. The rest of my hair she
cut in a straight curtain an inch below my earlobes, too short to
put into a ponytail but still needing to be tucked behind my ears.
Between cuts I might get it long enough to go into two stubby
bunches which stuck out like shaving brushes. I think she did it
deliberately.

But now I was older I went four times a year to Charisse.
Bettina pronounced my hair
difficult
, holding up the end of a lock
and letting it flop between her first two fingers, unimpressed. She
cut it in a longer version of what I had had before. I was trying to
grow out my fringe, but she always found the stray long bits and
gathered them back in again, remorselessly chopping before I
could say a word. I sat with my hands folded under the checked
nylon bib that Ida Carr had wafted over me when I sat down, and
watched silently as damp strands, longer than I could bear to part
with, fell into my lap.

The salon smelled of hair dye and perming solution and the
hairspray they kept in great gold silos.
Elnett
.
L'Oréal
. Exotic
words, full of promise, promise of transformation. Photos of
glamorous women with shining swirls of glamorous hair stood
on the counter and hung in the window. They dangled the
promise that such a look could be achieved here. They tempted
you to point to one and say, 'I'll have my hair like that,' but that
seemed to imply you thought you already had a wonderful
Hollywood face to match. And it was obvious that the soft halos
of curls in the pictures were a stratosphere above the parched
lawyers' wigs that emerged from under the dryers, to be pecked at
with the pointed end of a tail-comb, and sprayed and jointly
admired, front and back, and paid for and covered quickly with a
chiffon scarf for preservation from the weather outside. So you
just put up and shut up, and never mentioned that the haughty
Hollywood faces might be out of place.

I had always to go at a quiet time, when they could
fit me in
, so
there were only ever one or two customers beneath the monstrous
helmets of the dryers. They sat in their checked bibs, hands
issuing out the sides to turn the pages of
Woman's Realm
, flicking
through, hunting for the shocks and scandal of the problem page
or the doctor's column. Or they did if they were anything like
Barbara and me. Though Barbara was tougher with her advice
than Evelyn Home or Peggy Says ... 'Pathetic cow,' was Barbara's
response to some poor reader's misfortune, 'she should just dump
him.' Or, more radically: 'Cut his balls off !' It was not a remedy I'd
ever heard suggested for Eddy.

The mirror in front of me reflected the bank of shell-pink
dryers and just about everything else that went on in the salon.
Ida Carr came round with the broom, taking away your hair
before you could miss it. She wore navy velour slippers with
stuck-on diamonds on the toes. Purple veins bulged over her
insteps, snaked around her ankle bones and probably all the way
up her calves, but these were hidden under a dingy black skirt and
a pink overall, made of the same material as the salon's bibs. I
wanted her to sit down and take the weight off her feet but she
never did, always busy with the broom, or detaching curlers from
boiled heads, or fetching the hand mirror so that customers could
see the backs of their perms.

Mandy was usually there, in those fallow after-school hours,
sitting on one of the chairs where people waited. Sometimes there
was another kid there too, a child or grandchild of one of the
women under the dryers, and once there was a little dog, a
Yorkshire terrier with its fringe in a tartan bow. Mandy never took
any notice of them. She just sat there, knees drawn up and skirt
pulled down over them, biting away at the skin beside her thumbnail.
She didn't say anything, she didn't talk to me. Every so often
Bettina might glance across, or not even bother to glance, and ask,
'Right, Mand?' as if to check that she was still breathing. Mandy
would raise her eyebrows, or shrug her shoulders in response, a
weary-of-the-world gesture, a seen-it-all and couldn't-care-less
look.

And then Ida Carr would get even busier with the broom, and
customers would snap the clasps on their handbags and purses.
They waited until Bettina was concentrating on putting the coins
into the right sections of the till, or had drifted on to the occupant
of the next dryer, testing the next set of rollers and tucking cotton
wool round overheated ears. Then a swift hand would take
Mandy's hand from round her knees, and put a coin in her palm,
and tuck her fingers up over it, tightly, so as not to lose it. Would
pat her bony shoulder or her skinny knee, and a newly scented
head would whisper sweet nothings in her ear. Would smile, and
bustle out.

Mandy wasn't a little bastard any longer, and she obviously
wasn't going to die of anything any time soon, so what was it that
they were all worried about now?