Living In Perhaps (2 page)

I've been talking to someone recently. In here.
Here
's another
story. I'll get round to that one, in my own good time.

She came into my room without knocking. You have to keep
your door open, here, during the day. She just tapped on the door,
firmly, as if to say, 'I'm here, but I'm coming in whether you like
it or not,' and then she was in. She sat down straight away, without
asking if I minded.

'Hello. My name's Lorna. I'd like to talk to you.'

What she meant was 'I'd like
you
to talk to
me
.'

I don't care for all this first-name-terms stuff. It's supposed to
make everything feel relaxed and informal, but it just makes me
more suspicious. I'd rather she said, 'My name's Dr Smith,' or
whatever. They don't give you a chance to find out anything about
them, not even their place in the pecking order. What are they
hiding? A long and distinguished career in psychotherapy is my
guess.

They think that if they get you to call them Lorna, or Mike, or
Trudy, you'll slip into thinking they're only a nurse or a trainee
and you'll say something more revealing than if you thought you
were talking to a psychiatrist or a social worker. And they kid
themselves that they're being egalitarian and all-pals-together.
That they're not patronizing us. But I'd like to know exactly
who they are. I'd like to see the framed certificates, please.

So Lorna smiled and put her hands together in her lap and
looked encouraging, and I just sat there. I wasn't going to make it
easy for her. She was going to have to
squeeze
each little drop out
of me.

We both waited.

'I thought we could have a bit of a chat.'

I shrugged.

'Why don't you tell me something about yourself? We could
start with where you live. Your home.'

Well, I wasn't going to fall for that.

I'd much rather have chatted about something interesting. I'd
rather have talked about
anything
other than me. What came to
mind was Louisa May Alcott, and the bit where Jo March cuts off
her hair. I'd found the book on the window sill in my room,
tucked behind the curtain. I don't know if it had been hidden or
just left there, forgotten. I didn't care – it was something to read,
and I was already halfway through. So I smiled brightly at good
old Lorna and I said, 'Have you ever read
Little Women
?'

I must say I enjoyed watching her reaction. Various expressions
chased each other round her face, until finally one overwhelmed
the others and her features settled down into a simulacrum of
patient interest
. She thought she could wait. Hear me out, then pin
me down.

But I ran her ragged. All round the houses we went, never
touching home. Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran. I'll
say.

So – oh, Lorna, die for this! – I had a happy childhood. Happy
enough. Let me start by describing our home.

Whatever they say about it now, I don't remember the
children's home. As far as I'm concerned, I have always lived in
the same house, the same little bungalow with rectangular gardens,
back and front. Two parents, Mum and Dad, two children,
Carol and Brian. Our mum and dad have names, too. They are
called Edie and Ted, but we don't call them that. In fact, whenever
I hear another adult – invariably an aunt or uncle – call them by
their first names, I get a little squeeze of fright. Who dares to be
so familiar, so intimate? And who dares to forget that, really, who
they are is
Mum
and
Dad
?

There is a garage, and a car which he drives, she doesn't. There
are no pets over a certain size. There are weekdays, when he
works, and weekends, when he doesn't. He works at
the firm
. I
don't know what it does, and I don't know what he does there. It
is called Gough Electricals, but that still doesn't shed much light.
She used to be a bookkeeper there, but now she doesn't go out to
work. Now – in the long, elastic present I'm referring to, my childhood
and life so far.

For Brian and me, the days are mapped out by school and
Sunday school. We are nothing if not well behaved. We're terribly
well brought up. We wear the correct school uniforms, and
satchels on our backs. Neither of us is bright enough to get a place
at the grammar. I go to the girls' secondary modern, he goes to the
boys'. We do homework, we are Cubs and Brownies, Scouts and
Guides. We ride second-hand bikes.

Our home is set in a sea of bungalows. They're all very neat and
tidy but with a somehow seedy air about them, like all those
suburban streets whose inhabitants wish they were a little grander.
They're pre-war, past their best – a bit like their owners. At the end
of our road, right next door to us, there's an anomaly, a much
older house, a spacious double villa left high and dry from an
earlier age when the town hadn't crept this far. Tucked between
hedges and trees, it hides away, ignoring the neighbours, trying to
pretend we don't exist. Trying to pretend it's sailing alone through
the fields, just like it used to. Whenever I walked home down our
road, I wondered what it must have been like before the bungalows
existed. A house right in the middle of nowhere, with the high
road in the distance curving away across the fields; just the leaves
rustling and cows tearing at the grass, no modern din of lawnmowers
or transistor radios. Once or twice when I was playing
outside I dared go as far as the front gate, crouching down and
peeping through the bars at it: a fairytale house in bungalow-land.

But I'm not going there just yet. I'm staying away from that
particular house.

The bungalows are L-shaped at the front, with a big bay
window swathed in net curtains, because this was the main bedroom,
and no one wants the postman or the milkman or the
neighbours staring into their bedroom. The path from the front
gate goes straight as an arrow to the front door, set in the corner
of the L. Each front door has a rising sun or a sailing ship made
out of stained glass in its window, and two more little windows
either side to let some light into the hallway. The windows are
always of frosted glass, to thwart prying eyes. In some of them you
can see the outline of a pot plant, or a vase of flowers. If the
flowers look especially healthy or brilliantly coloured, you can bet
they're plastic. They're given away free with soap powder and
petrol, and they look so real and last so well, and, after all, are
so
convenient
.

Because these houses are small and set all on one level, they're
popular with retired people, or middle-aged couples whose
children have grown up and gone, or couples who never had
children. But our parents had children, in the end, and they
needed to expand. A few of the bungalows expanded outwards,
sticking on a sun-lounge, or a utility room to house the freezer
and the washing machine. Ours expanded upwards, into an attic
bedroom in the roof. This is my first taste of injustice.

Although he's fifteen months younger than me, Brian gets the
bedroom in the roof. Even though it could be argued that he is
more likely to trip on the stairs, or need help in the night for a
nightmare or a wee – and it's true that he frequently wet the bed
– or simply that he might like to be nearer Mum and Dad than I
(being older) would,
he
gets given the room in the roof. He is a
boy. Boys always get privileges, earned or not.

I have the smallest bedroom, the one right next to the garage.
It's plain as a nun's cell, despite the eye-jangling wallpaper.
A narrow bed, a single wardrobe, a small chest of drawers, all
white-painted wood. A bookshelf with a few Enid Blytons and my
Bible and prayer book. The only softening touches are the fluffy
pyjama case on the bed, and a print on the wall of a puppy and a
kitten sitting amicably together in a basket. The view from my
window is the front path, the front gate, the hard standing for
the car. Even so I used to spend a lot of time staring out of my
bedroom window. I put my head under the net curtains to look
out: I couldn't stand that film of nylon between my eyes and the
outside world. 'You've been gawping out of this window again,
haven't you?' my mother would say, tugging the curtains straight.
As if looking out of a window was a crime. Well, it was fine to look
out, but you mustn't be seen doing so.

My gazing wasn't strictly observational: it was the sort that
cows do, looking soulfully into the middle distance while their
jaws keep moving and sometimes their tails lift to let out squirts
of dung. Gazing out provided a view for my imagination to rest
on and blank out. Maybe that's just what cows are doing, stuck in
the same old field, as they while away the dismal hours.

But I wanted to be up in the roof, under the sloping ceiling
where model biplanes dangled. I wanted to be able to lie in bed
and gaze out of the dormer window, over the roof tiles and the
neat back gardens, to the low hills and greenness inland. There's a
feeling, when you're up there, of being alone, complete, like being
in a well-defended castle on a mound. As if you could pull up the
ladder and shut the trapdoor and no one could come up unless
you said so. But you can't. There's just an ordinary door and a
steep flight of red-carpeted stairs leading down to the hall.

I don't think Brian could have cared less which room he had.
He isn't an imaginative sort of boy. His talents lie firmly in the
realm of the practical. He built model aeroplanes out of plastic
kits and made stupid noises with his mouth as he flew them
round in his hand, but I'm sure he didn't imagine anything other
than 'Here is an aeroplane, flying along.'

We live near the coast, though you'd hardly know it. Eastwards,
everything's so flat you can't see the sea at all. The horizon is a line
of houses. Our road is right at the inland edge of the town. But
the soil is full of sand, and the trees are the sort you get near the
sea, stunted hawthorns and pine trees, growing in fixed, crouched
positions, as if the wind never blows from any other direction.

We're near the main road out of town, and on summer weekends
there's always a traffic jam, because of the day trippers. They
want their glimpse of the sea, and then when they've had enough
they want to go home – all at the same time. Hot and thirsty and
sunburnt, with quarrelsome kids in the back. Maybe they sit there
in the stalled queue and look out of their car windows and wish
they lived here, near the sea. Perhaps they catch a glimpse of Dad
doing the garden or us on our bikes, and they wish they were us
and not them, not stuck in the traffic with another fifty miles to
go yet. I'd see kids with their sticky mouths pressed up against the
windows, staring out at me, and I'd know they wanted to be me.
Me astride my bike, with my suntanned legs and my chewing
gum, and no one telling me to
for God's sake, sit still!

Perhaps they did.

I've always found it too easy to think of
perhaps
, to live in
perhaps. The perhaps of being a Carolyn, the perhaps of people
who wished they were us. It's so tempting. So much better than
real life.

At least I don't have to share a room in here. I'd hate that. Because
I've never had to share my bedroom. I never dreamed of going to
boarding school and sleeping in a dormitory with half a dozen
other girls. Where would you ever get any privacy? And what if
they snored? What if they had nightmares, or smelly feet? That
wouldn't do for me. I've been used to privacy, and being on my
own. A certain amount of loneliness. Aloneness. I'm not sure
what the difference is.

God knows what a room-mate might get up to, in here. From
what I've seen so far, the others are all completely barmy. Mad as
hatters. Snoring and smelly feet would be the least of it.

I know I sound quite cheerful, but I'm not. I try to look cheerful
and careless, to anyone who's watching.
Nothing to worry
about, that's me!
It wouldn't do to wander around with your tail
between your legs, forlorn, or looking guilty. Especially looking
guilty.

'Give some people an inch and they'll take a mile,' my mum used
to say. 'Hold out the hand of friendship, and you never know what
you're letting yourself in for.'

So we didn't know our neighbours. We didn't really know anyone
in the road, beyond a pleasant nodding and helloing when we
passed. That was what you did – you never ignored anyone, but
you never became too intimate.

'I wouldn't want people always in and out of the house,' she
said.

It was unlikely. My mum and dad weren't very encouraging.
They had no one you might term 'friends'. My mother went to
church regularly, and my father irregularly, but they kept the busy
church community firmly at arm's length, turning down everything
except the most formal invitations. The only people who
came to our house were family, and the only people we visited
were family, my dad's two sisters Gloria and Stella, his cousin
Bettina, and my mum's brother Bob.

We certainly didn't know our neighbours with
the hedge
.

In the fashion of the neighbourhood, our front garden was
divided from our other neighbours and the road by a chain of
white links slung between foot-high posts. The back garden had a
low fence of brown palings. The aim was always to be able to
see
– to see the neighbours in their gardens, the washing on the lines,
the people going down the road. And to
be seen
. To be seen doing
the neighbourly thing, which was keeping your own patch
trim and tidy. And following the rules, cleaning the car at
weekends and no bonfires before seven. There might have been
frosted glass and nets at every window, but outside all had to be
crystal clear.

We were at the outer edge of this oasis of good citizenship. We
lived in the last bungalow in the street. Beyond us was a wilderness
of thistly fields, scrubby woodland, tumbledown sheds and
half-hearted fences. Old tyres, discarded machinery and scruffy
ponies were corralled back there. And right along our inland
boundary, shielding us from this wasteland and from the house
next door, the very last house of all –
the old house
– ran the hedge.
Solid as Sleeping Beauty's thicket, a wall of evergreen laurel, it
stretched from the pavement at the front to the far end of our
back garden, and grew untrimmed to the height of our roof. At
least, it grew untrimmed on their side. On our side, Dad would
snip away constantly with the shears, keeping it as tame as he
could. But he wasn't brave enough or furious enough to get up on
a ladder and have a go at the top.

'That hedge sucks all the life out of the garden,' he always said.
He'd walk up and down the lawn, examining the grass, shaking
his head and tutting, trying to make out something poorer in its
colour or texture which he could blame on the hedge. It was true
that bedding plants didn't flourish near the hedge's roots. The soil
beneath it was dry and starved.

'It's so inconsiderate,' my mother agreed. 'It casts so much
shade.'

'Only in the morning,' I pointed out, when I was old enough to
notice. 'Not when you want to sit out here.'

I wanted to defend the hedge, and its owners. I was fascinated
by the idea of something
different
, something secretive and wild.
I just didn't have the words to say it.

And it was true: on summer afternoons our back garden was a
blaze of sun. You couldn't get away from it; there was nothing
higher than a foot tall to cast any shade, apart from the shed. My
dad laid out the garden on the basis of interior decoration, and
maintained it as neatly as a room kept for 'best'. The lawn was a
carpet, a perfect rectangle, smooth and free of weeds, with a strip
of bare brown earth – the parquet – all around it. Then he ran
dwarf plants round the edges, like wallpaper, alternating the
colours: white alyssum, blue lobelia, red salvia, ginger French
marigolds. To earn our pocket money I pulled up weeds and
Brian mowed the lawn, but Dad always did the edges himself. He
couldn't trust anyone else to get such straight edges as he did.

So the hedge stood for all that was threatening: the unneighbourliness
of our neighbours, their suspect desire for
privacy, the proximity of behaviour that was not fit for the
scrutiny of others. Well, of course, my parents didn't say this, they
couldn't have put their feelings into words. But the way Mum
said, 'I wish they'd do something about that hedge,' whenever
she came in from hanging the washing, and the prim
click-click of Dad's shears in the summer dusk, were quite enough.

We knew that there were a lot of them next door. It was a big
house, full of loud careless people. You could tell that from the
sudden and various noises which came from beyond the laurel
barrier. My parents never tackled them about the noise, or about
the vast size of the hedge. They were fearful of any kind of interference,
in case people interfered back.

'You just never know with
people
,' my father said. 'You never
know what they'll stoop to.'

And anyway, they got a funny kind of satisfaction from complaining,
from having a permanent reason to feel disgruntled. A
perfectly ordered world would have been less rewarding on that
score.

I was playing on my own when I found the hole in the hedge. I
couldn't believe my father had missed it.

It must have been spring, because the daffodils were out and
the buds hadn't burst yet on the trees. I would have been eight,
coming up for nine. I had some complicated game going on in my
head and was pretending to hide down beside the shed. The space
was too narrow for my dad to slide into with his shears. The long
stems of the laurel splayed out, pressing up against the shed wall,
leaving just a low passageway for me to creep into. I crept. There
was no chance that Brian had been here before me, because he
didn't like spiders. Neither did I, but some things are too good to
miss just because a creepy-crawly might fall down your neck.

And there was the hole. The laurels gave way, and formed a sort
of tunnel. I pushed my head and shoulders into the gap. Inside,
disappointingly, the tunnel stopped. Laurel twigs criss-crossed in
front of me. But I was in, and it was easier to go forward than
back. I crouched down, dropped on to hands and knees, and
inched forward. The ground stank of dirty old leaves and
mushroomy damp. I peered through the thick stems to the light
beyond. I was at the back of some kind of flower bed, filled with
leafless bushes.

For the very first time I could see into next door's back garden.
It wasn't as I had imagined. For a start, it was nothing like ours. It
was so much bigger. Towards the house there was an abandoned
bike, and a tree stump, and a swing. In the other direction, a
sagging tennis net, and an old wooden summer house, its window
panes cracked and its wood peeling. Their lawn wasn't lawn, in
the sense that I understood the word. The patchy grass was almost
knee-high. In the borders dead plants leaned against each other
with their seed-heads still on them. The far end of the garden was
full of trees, gnarled bare trees planted in rows. I recognized this
from our
Children's Encyclopaedia
, the double-page spread that
depicted a mixed farm in glorious detail: this was an orchard.

Something moved. My eyes flicked back to the summer house:
there was a man. My skin prickled. I kept absolutely still, barely
daring to breathe. A twig stuck into my ear, but I ignored it. At
least the man was far away and had his back to me. I realized that
he was completely absorbed in what he was doing, though I
couldn't for the life of me work out what that was. He didn't pause
or even look up. He was painting a huge board propped against
the wall of the summer house, but the bit he had painted and the
bit he hadn't painted looked exactly the same.

I stayed where I was for a good five minutes, burning with
cramp, itching with fear. But part of me felt triumphant. The man
I was spying on was
our neighbour
. The owner of the hedge.

Suddenly I wanted a garden like that. I'd never seen anything
like it. Untidy, haphazard, full of secret corners. Different things
could go on there – you could ride a bike on the lawn and just
throw it down where you finished with it. You could play tennis,
you could hide. And whatever people did do there, it didn't
involve manicuring the grass and mowing stripes into it.

I never crawled through the hole again. The laurel burst with
bright new leaves to fill the gaps, and started shedding old dead
ones. They scattered like dandruff along the foot of the hedge.
Spiders began spinning businesslike webs. Anyway, I knew it
would end in trouble. Most things did. If I tried again Mum or
Dad was bound to spot me backing out of the hole. Or I'd be discovered
in the act of spying by the people who lived next door.
And you never knew with
people
. I could imagine the shouts:
'Hey! What do you think you're doing? Get out! Get back to where
you came from!' Or worse: taking me by my collar and marching
me, red-handed, or, rather, green-kneed, back to my parents. I
could see the pair of them, clustering in our front doorway, their
faces anxious and uncomprehending. 'What on earth were you up
to? Making an exhibition of yourself! And
us
.' Explain that
away.

I relied on my imagination, my usual tactic. In my mind's eye
their garden expanded even further. The pockmarked lawn
stretched in all directions and grew almost as green as ours, the
thicket of shrubs I'd crouched in sprang into a forest, the summer
house into a play-palace fit for Marie Antoinette. In my head I
played – and won – endless games of tennis. I cycled like the wind
up and down, up and down, never hitting a pothole, never catching
my shin on the backspin of the pedal as I put my foot down
to heave my bike round the corners. In my head, I never had to
put my foot down to heave it round corners. I was perfectly
competent, and that garden was mine. All mine.

Sad to say, those little chats with Lorna have become a daily event.
I thought I'd beaten her, that first time she came into my room. I
thought I'd won that round, and she wouldn't try again. Shows
how much I know.

We meet in a small room off the front hall. Mid-morning or
mid-afternoon, usually. Someone comes and gets me from
wherever I am, Mike or Trudy or whoever is on duty. 'Time to see
Lorna,' they say. Or just 'Carol?' and a hand signal, a beckoning
finger and then a point towards the front hall. They don't let me
go on my own, just in case I never get there. They always take
me right up to the door.

There's a table which is not quite a desk, and two chairs beside
it, facing each other. It's not exactly formal but it's certainly not
in
formal, either. I expect Lorna thinks it strikes just the right note.
Whatever that might be.

Today she asked me what I was good at, what I liked doing, and
I said, 'Nothing much.'

'Oh, I'm sure that can't be true.'

She pressed her lips together as if she was cross. There was a
long silence. I examined my fingers. As far as I was concerned, we
could go on like this until the end of the session. It didn't matter
to me.

Then Lorna coughed in a fake sort of way, and pushed with her
fingertips at the edge of a folder beside her on the table. A folder
which was shut. 'I've been looking again at your records,' she said.
'You've had rather a tricky time, haven't you? Almost four years in
the children's home before being placed for adoption. Some
rather difficult years with your new family. And then this latest
business. Still, at least you always had your brother with you.'

She didn't say anything else. After a bit she let me go.

But outside, I thought: Why can't
I
look at my records? They're
my
records. Why can't I see what everyone's been saying about
me?

I should have said piano. When she asked what I was good at,
that's what I should have said.