Living In Perhaps (19 page)

I hadn't ever learned to climb trees. It wasn't the sort of skill
you picked up round our way, not with all those hawthorns. Even
though it looked like a good climbing tree with stout horizontal
branches, the first ones were still some way up, high above my
head. The trunk was well-used, shiny with slithered footmarks.
This was yet another thing Barbara had never mentioned, or
shown me.

'Oh, God,' Tom said, in the kind of voice in which people say, 'I
suppose
I'll
have to do it.' He swung his arms around a branch
above his head, and then lunged his body into a pendulum effect.
On the third swing his feet caught round the branch and he
hauled himself up on to it. After that it was easy, footholds and
handholds within reach all the way up.

I tried the same method, but couldn't get my legs high enough.
Eventually I scrabbled them up on to the trunk and he hauled me,
painfully, over the first branch. My ribs were scraped, right
through my jumper. I climbed after him, holding my breath, not
looking down.

We stood only about twenty feet up, I suppose, on alternate
hitches, facing each other. But it felt very high to me. You could
see out over the wood. You could see surprisingly far away. In my
direction, over the bungalow roofs, towards the cluster of far-off
taller buildings that was town, and in the distance a thin grey line
not much darker than the sky: the sea. Tom faced the low green
hills, the main road.

'I wish it was higher. I wish I could get right to the top,' Tom
said. 'I've been higher, but you can't get
right
up there.'

'There are caterpillars in these leaves.' I was trying not to feel
disgusted.

He grinned. 'Caterpillars, and spiders. All kinds of bugs.'

I wasn't going to let him put me off. I said, 'It's quiet up here.'
It was. Miles away, you could hear someone whistling for a dog,
but that was all.

'I know.'

We listened for a bit, hearing the quiet keenly. I think we'd
scared all the birds away.

'Oh, I can hear Sebastian,' I said. He had started learning the
trumpet. I could pick out its uncertain blasts, remote and barely
musical. 'I can hear your house.'

Tom began kicking the trunk.

'Someone's always doing something in your house,' I said,
happily. 'There's always someone there.'

I noticed that his sweet mouth was pressed into an angry line.

'I know,' he said. Kick, kick. 'That's the bloody problem. The
bloody fucking problem.'

And that was the problem. I didn't seek to compare the two,
our house and their house. I kept them completely separate in my
mind, as if to place them side by side would be to damage or
endanger them in some way. The Hennessys' house, household,
way of life, was separate and complete; and so was ours. Just hold
your breath, and don't look.

Only, of course, I longed to live there, to be them and not me,
not we, especially not we. Because while we disliked and were dismayed
by them, they despised and disparaged us. And who wants
to be on the receiving end of that?

*

I said to Brian, casually, 'Have you ever been in the woods? Do you
know the climbing tree?'

'Course I do. Everyone does. Me and Pete go there. We go right
to the top.'

So that told me.

Once Tom showed me the oak tree, it became part of the
territory I roamed in. Later that summer we found that someone
had fixed up a swinging rope in its branches. Sebastian was
furious. 'Someone else has been here! Someone else has been in
our
tree!'

There wasn't much space to swing, but it was the only big tree
anywhere around. So maybe everyone did know it.

We took turns to climb up and swing on the rope. It was thick,
and beneath the knot it frayed into a tassel like the feathers on a
carthorse's hoof. You swung, twirling, leaf litter beneath your feet,
the network of branches and leaves above letting flashes of sunlight
down. The rope creaked suspiciously above you. Any minute
it might break; your neck with it, or at least your legs and arms.
But we couldn't keep off it. We hated giving it up for the next person's
turn.

When it wore thin and frayed to breaking point, another rope
appeared, and then another, hanging beside the rags of all the old
ropes. I never found out who put them there but I bet Brian knew.

Hanny doesn't eat with other people. She has to eat alone in her
room, and her meals are supervised. She's got a way round it,
though. It's so boring, supervising her, she said, that they don't
always watch, not all the time. She showed me how, inside her big
bell-shaped sleeves, she has picked the deep hem undone and put
a little plastic bag into it. Into the bag go bits of food, whenever
they're not looking. 'I'm just like a conjurer,' she said, 'I'm so
quick.'

'Maybe you could make your living doing that, when you get
out of here.'

'What, sticking food up my sleeves?' she said, but I knew she
knew what I meant.

When she folded her sleeves back to show me the plastic bags
inside, I could see her wrists. They were as thin and white as I
expected. And they had scars on them. One was white, diagonal,
from the bottom of her thumb across to the bumps of her wristbone.
The scar on the other arm was raised, red, with pink flesh
around it, as if it were newer. It made me think of Barbara and our
club, the blunt knife and the brooch pin and the blood brotherhood.
I don't think Hanny had wanted to mingle her blood with
anyone else's. And I don't think she'd just used a pin.

But I believe she must have meant for me to see her scars.

*

We were in Woolworth's once when I glimpsed Patrick. I'd never
actually seen him out anywhere before, only driving away in his
van. He was up at the far end, where they used to have the tea bar.
He stood by the counter with a cup of coffee and chatted
animatedly to the girl who was serving. I was with Barbara and
Gaynor, but they were right across the other side of the shop. We
weren't stealing anything, we didn't steal from Woolworth's any
more: it was small-fry. We were just shopping, out for a wander,
out for a look. I tried to drift past but Patrick saw me, caught my
eye. He put out a hand, almost touching me. 'Well, hello there,
Caro! What're you about?' I didn't quite know what he meant:
what are you doing, or what are you drinking? His white cup was
still in his hand. He might have been offering me a cup of coffee.
I said vaguely, looking away, 'Oh ... I'm just out shopping, with
Barbara. She's over there.' I pointed vaguely. My face felt red.

'Well, well,' he said. 'Then off you go, quick. I'd better not keep
you if the lovely Barbara wants your company.' And he turned
back to the girl behind the counter, affability itself.

I hurried over to Barbara and Gaynor, and bundled them out
of the shop. 'Your dad's here,' I said.

'Well, so what?' asked Barbara. Yes, so what? I didn't know.

But it was the first time a Hennessy, apart from Barbara, had
seen
me out in public. Had noticed me, had spoken to me.

At the secondary mod there was something called Social Service.
This wasn't what it is coming to mean. It wasn't anything to do
with unmarried mothers, or people who batter their children, or
families that are not really functioning. Anyway, families did seem
to function – as long as they knew what they were supposed to be
like, they managed to keep up appearances. As long as they cared.
And everyone knew what you were supposed to be like. Or everyone
I knew, at least.

Social Service was helping people less fortunate than ourselves.
It was character-building. It was raising money for charity by
organizing a sponsored walk, or it was visiting deaf old ladies in
the nearby home for the elderly. Or it was knitting squares. Each
different year in the school did a different kind of Social Service,
and in the first year the task was knitting. Knitting squares for
afghans, the teacher said. I just hoped they wanted them.

'I've got to knit a six-inch square,' I told my mother when I got
home.

'Well, go on, then,' she said. It might seem obvious, with all the
knitting and sewing that she did, that she would have passed her
skills on to me. But I had avoided learning. It's easy when you're
young, always ducking out to play, needing to practise those
bicycle turns, just having to get in some more roller-skate miles.
But with secondary school came female skills. She took my
clumsy hands in hers and forced them into the shapes for knit
one, purl one. A lumpy bit of knitting, as disgusting as tripe in the
butcher's tray, emerged from my needles. It was baby-blue, a
colour she happened to have spare. The edges were steps and
stairs, four inches wide at one side, seven on the other.

'Can't you do it for me?' I pleaded.

'Most certainly not.' Social Service was Social Service. The
merit was in doing it yourself. You couldn't pay other people to do
it for you. Or even
not
pay them to do it for you. I took my
scrappy square in to school. I discovered that afghans were
blankets, sewn together from even-sized squares of knitting. Mine
failed the entrance test. I was put on stitching the squares
together. Even this I was bad at. I hadn't inherited my mother's
deft fingers.

Another kind of Social Service was taking library books round
the wards of the long-stay hospital. This was for the more mature
pupils. Somehow I had become mature, despite my incompetence
over knitted squares. We were driven there during the lunch break
by Miss Jessop, the RE teacher: me and Suzannah Grey and
Mildred Clark. I think we were chosen because we happened to be
wearing the most respectable skirts. Long-stay patients were not
to be inflamed. We were given boxes of books and a hospital
trolley with an eccentric offside front wheel. I don't know how
this was supposed to build our characters, though it certainly gave
us practice for a grand future as tea ladies, should we decide to
follow that career path.

I expect what the patients wanted were Wild West novels and
syrupy romances and good old-fashioned murders, and there was
a sprinkling of those, well thumbed. But on the whole our
barrowload of literary goodies was mind-improving, and it was
with these we had to tempt the bedridden, and the frail-but-mobile
types who congregated in the day room. A history of
ecclesiastical decoration. Fruit-preserving for beginners.
Beethoven and his world. A guide to the Swiss Alps. It was uphill
work.

And then one lunchtime, on top of the pile I was sorting was a
book about twentieth-century art. I sat down on a vacant chair
and leafed through it. Let's face it, none of the patients was going
to snatch it from my hands. They clamoured for Zane Grey and
Georgette Heyer, not modern art. Thick paint, obscure shapes,
stupid splattery canvases. I reached the chapter on portraiture,
rather a thin one. On one of the pages, only taking up half the
space (the top half was a scribbly head and shoulders of a miserablelooking
old man), was a painting, 'Tillie: In an Interlude'.

It was definitely Tillie. Not by Patrick. I can't remember who it
was by. But I noticed the date. Over twenty years ago. She sat, half
sideways to the viewer, with light streaming down on her from a
high window. Her dress was sky-blue, and lit white on the far side
by the sunshine; her fair hair hung heavy like some thick crop
stood ready for harvesting; her expression was far away, untroubled,
thoughtful. Physically she looked just the same as now,
except that she was very pregnant.

So Tillie was real. Tillie was famous. Tillie had really sat for
artists out in the world, artists who got their pictures put in
books. Hennessys existed outside of their house, outside my
fevered imagination. I could hardly believe it.

My school took me off Social Service before the term was up.
They said I had stolen a book. I honestly thought that no one
would miss it, but it was a bit too big to hide.

Hanny and I still have that quiz. I keep it as a bookmark, folded
up in the back of my one book. The best bit about the quiz is that
we don't know what the hell it's about and we don't have the
answers. The first time we got to question twelve and completed
it, Hanny said, 'OK. Let's see how we've done. What we scored. Are
we the Hostess with the Mostest or the Pathetic Party Bore?' And
then she screamed. It made me think of Barbara, that short,
sharp, artificial scream of rage she let out when she got to the
bottom of the column. ' "Turn to page 29 to see how you rate ..."
We don't
have
page twenty-nine. And rate as what? As
what
!?'

But once she got over her frustration it was better. It was better
not to have the results. We could make them up. It kept the quiz
interesting for much longer than a whole quiz would have been.
We became obsessed by it.

Hanny leaned back and lifted up her knees, hugging them. She
raised her eyes to the sky. 'You scored mostly As: You are a homeloving
type with a deeply dull soul. You will give your future
husband socks for Christmas and deny him your body.'

'Mostly Bs,' I said. 'You're a free spirit, a wild soul. A pain in the
arse. Your friends loathe you and your family pretend you're not
theirs. Throw away your hand-woven clothes and comb your hair.
Please
. As a favour to mankind.'

'This magazine begs you.'

'This anonymous magazine begs you—'

We saw Moira advancing down the path. Her tiny shoes made
miraculously fast progress over the paving slabs. She was coming
towards us. We were laughing too much. Enjoying ourselves. We
stopped at once and turned drab faces towards her. We didn't
want to give anything away.

Today I came around the corner at the appointed hour for my
little chat, just
before
the appointed hour, and saw Lorna standing
there in the hallway with Dr Travis. She was saying something,
something that sounded like '... getting nowhere fast, absolutely
nowhere'. He leaned towards her a little, wearing that sweet,
attentive but ever-so-slightly distant expression of his. He always
looks like that, as if he is listening in order to be polite but really
is not terribly interested. I like that about him. I prefer it. Lorna is
avid, but he is just a well-brought-up boy, doing his job.

Then they saw me. And shut up.

I began to catch sight of Mandy in the high street.

Instead of spending her Saturdays in Charisse, now she went
into town and hung around with other kids who were at a loose
end. Rough kids, the sort I never spoke to and even avoided
glancing at. I'd see her sitting on the ledge at the foot of the war
memorial, swinging her thin bare legs. It wasn't meant to be a
seat, just an innocent ledge, part of the memorial's design.
Perhaps it was included so that mourners could rest flowers on it,
or wreaths on Poppy Day. Only now it had become a seat for disaffected
youth, lounging and kicking their heels against the
meat-coloured marble sides. There was a horse trough too, from
the days when horses made up a considerable part of the passing
traffic, and the council had tried to plant it up with petunias.
Only disaffected youth rested its bottom there and squashed the
petunias flat. Perhaps in the days of horse-drawn traffic and war
dead there was no time for disaffected youth. Perhaps little
children grew straight from button boots and pinafores into work
clothes and were too busy and too hungry and too tired to look
around and complain. Far too preoccupied with scraping a living
to go off the rails.

Then I saw Tom in town with a girl.

It was Mandy who drew this to my attention. Mandy was up at
the secondary modern now, too. Sometimes we happened to pass
in the corridors and would nod mutely, but that was the limit of
our acknowledgement. She was usually with a gaggle of girls,
those noisy and self-possessed types who never took any notice of
the pecking order of age. I could see that she was emerging from
her shell again. Whatever had gone horribly wrong for her had
righted itself, or maybe she'd adjusted to it. I don't know. She was
a closed book to me. Those opaque grey eyes looked at you but
never let you know what she was thinking. I don't know what that
says about the windows of the soul – maybe that Mandy had no
soul?

Her face wore exactly the same look as it had when she was a
child, and I could see just how she would be as an adult. She didn't
change as other people changed, their bones expanding and altering
the proportions of their faces, prettiness arriving or
departing. She stayed the same, with that mean-eyed, hunted,
shocked white face, that undernourished face of hers,
permanently starving for something she couldn't have.

I was standing at the bus stop one afternoon, feeling blank, just
waiting, when Mandy appeared at my side. 'That boy that lives
next door to you,' she said. I made sure my face stayed impassive.
Mandy knew everyone, God knows how. Perhaps her years of
eavesdropping on all the gossip in Charisse had equipped her
with this knowledge. Her brain was a gazetteer, she had the town's
complete set of mugshots and fingerprints embedded there. Just a
quick flick and someone, anyone, could be located. There should
have been a great future ahead for a girl with such talents. She
went on, 'I seen him on the prom. In a shelter. Wiv a girl. Black
hair, mascara. You know her? Paula, her name is. Paula Wright.'

Mandy watched me with her head on one side, her cheek
bulging with gum. I gave her a theatrical frown, then an irritated
grin. 'What? What are you talking about? What's that got to do
with me?'

Mandy shrugged. 'Just thought you'd want to know.' And she
slid away as easily as she'd arrived.

So then I knew where to look.

Seeing Tom with a girl actually wasn't as bad as imagining
seeing Tom with a girl.

There was something about him – he was indisputably
attractive, not only to me. Despite his light eyes and his pale
lashes, his careless lack of chivalry. Perhaps
because of
his lack of
chivalry. So there was indeed a black-haired girl with a fair
amount of mascara. But her hair was short, like a cap, and she
wasn't at all pretty. She was even a bit fat. I caught a glimpse of
them, not that same afternoon (although I looked, I wasted a
good hour or more hunting him down) but a few days later. She
was walking quickly along the seafront, and Tom was hurrying
after her with that uneven loping stride he had at the time, as if he
hadn't yet got used to his height and the terrible size of his feet. I
had imagined them entwined on a seat, gazing fondly into each
other's eyes, or worse. I watched the girl stop. Tom touched her
shoulder with an outstretched hand. They exchanged a few words.
The girl shrugged his hand away, and then they parted, walking
off in different directions. Neither of them looked back.

This was OK. I could cope with this.

Later, though, I glimpsed the unmistakable back of his head in
one of the shelters on the promenade. He had his arm around a
girl with blonde hair. I saw them put their faces together. I saw
them kiss. I saw their mouths open wide and their cheeks hollow
in the kind of kiss where you eat the other person up. Not loving
kisses, not melting kisses. Hard, pushing ones, where you tell the
other person what you think of them, what you would like to do
to them, given half a chance.

I see they have taken out the blocks of butter-yellow tulips and the
blue forget-me-nots. The gardeners are at work now filling in
the earth rectangles with other colours. One is full of busy Lizzies.
I think they will be shocking scarlet when they all come out, to
judge by the one or two that have opened flowers so far. They
seem to have a craze for bright red in their colour schemes here,
the colour of brand-new, just-leaked blood. Controversial, I'd say.
Another bed is filled with silver-leaved plants, a fluffy silver velvet
of the sort Hanny might well have in her wardrobe. I don't think
these will ever come into flower; they're planted out for their
foliage alone.

I asked one, of the gardeners what they were called, but he
wouldn't tell me. He wouldn't even look at me, but kept his head
down and dug away frantically with his trowel.

I've always thought the gardeners here aren't right in the head.

I went looking for Hanny. She was on our usual bench. She
said, 'I've got a visitor. David's coming to see me this afternoon.'

I was astonished. It hadn't occurred to me that people visited,
like in an ordinary hospital. Or a prison. Here I am, convinced
that I've got a fertile imagination, and yet I never thought of this.
Turns out I can't imagine further than the end of my nose.

'I think he's coming to tell me it's over between us.'

'Why would he do that?'

Hanny threw her arms out in a wide shrug. Today she was
wearing an ice-blue mohair sweater, with long sleeves that she
tucked over her knuckles to keep warm. Even in the summer sunshine
she felt cold. 'Why not?'

I was still wrestling with the idea of a visitor, someone from
Out There coming to see someone In Here. I suppose it could be
said that sometimes
I
don't listen properly, either. But I tried to
pay attention to her.

'I mean, what have we got going for us?' she went on. 'Me
banged up like this for months. Him out in the real world. He
probably wants a nice, proper girlfriend. One who likes him, for a
start.' She laughed her husky humourless laugh, the one she saved
for when she was staring straight ahead at nothing.

'He might not. He might just be coming to see you. See how
you are.'

'Doubt it. No, he's come to finish with me. I can feel it in my
bones. And I've got very sensitive bones, believe me.' She shivered
and folded the spare volume of the sweater round her ribs.

I asked her, 'Will you be upset if he does?'

She turned to look at me. 'Why would I be upset?' Her stare was
as bold and baleful as Mandy's. 'I told you, David was my
mother's idea all along. Not mine. David's just a passport to make
me look OK. In the
real world
.'

'Right. I get it.' I didn't know if I believed her. She sounded
pretty upset to me.

'And we're not in the real world, are we, here? And we're not
OK.'

Suddenly she laughed her brisk cheerful laugh, the one I
thought was genuine.

'Don't tell me you thought we
were
OK!?'

She laughed so hard she threatened to fall off the seat.

When I saw her next day, I asked Hanny, 'What did he say?'

She looked at me blankly. 'What did who say?'

'David.'

'Oh.' She turned away, pulling her sleeves down over her hands,
kicking at a fallen flower on the path. 'He didn't say anything. He
never turned up.'

'What, not at all? No message, nothing?'

'Nn-nn.' She kicked with her other foot. The toe of her cowboy
boot was scuffed.

'What happened, do you think?'

She shook her head. 'He chickened out.'

Hanny didn't seem at all bothered. I don't know what to make
of that. Maybe he never existed at all. Maybe she just made him
up.