Living In Perhaps (23 page)

So she has got round to him at last.

'When you were younger you were very close, your mother
reported. Your
adoptive
mother.'

Then she does a thing with her eyebrows, a freaky thing she's
started doing recently, raising them and looking at me, and then
lowering one eyebrow on its own. Remarkable muscular control.
I've tried it myself, without success, I have to say. There's a small
mirror bolted to the wall in my room, and the first time she tried
it on me I went straight upstairs and practised it in there. I looked
like a gurning champion at a country fair, but I still couldn't do
what Lorna does. It's very distracting. Maybe that's what she
intends.

I try to keep my mind off Lorna's facial gymnastics and on
what she is saying.

'You used to play together all the time, in the garden and the
neighbourhood, with the local children.'

Yes, because there wasn't any choice.

'And you had friends in common.'

Does she mean those twins we forced to be our chariot horses?
The little boy with the trike?
Mandy?
I really feel like saying something
here. Almost.

Lorna grows expansive. 'From about the age of eight or nine,
though, boys and girls tend to separate into groups of the same
sex. Their friendships polarize. Girls loathe boys, boys loathe girls.
Or they say they do. Does any of this sound familiar?'

'Polarize,' I say. 'I like that word.'

Lorna twitches faintly.

'You and Brian were no longer quite so close. You were busy
turning into a rebel, while Brian was much more conventional.
That must have been very galling for you.'

I feel a bit queasy.

'But later on, when your new friends palled, you got together
again.'

That's the trouble with files, with reports, with the
official
version
– you can see how they got the story they end up with, but
you can also see where they've gone so very, very wrong. How
they've ended up with fiction. Little Red Riding Hood picked up
her basket and went off visiting, good intentions all round. What
happened in the murky light under the trees is another matter:
the wolf, the grandma, the woodcutter ... How do we know for
sure who was grinning, and whose blood was spilt? And just who
was wielding that axe?

Lorna says, 'You and Brian, you're all each other has, when it
comes down to it.'

She gives me a long look, not unsympathetic.

I want to say: no, you've got it wrong. He had Mum and Dad.
They were always on his side. Or more on his side than mine. And
he knew it, and he worked on it. Sticking his hand inside them like
glove puppets, and wagging their heads, and watching me while
he did it. And grinning all the time.

I want to
say something
. To Lorna. It's not fair. She has brought
me to this pass.

I cross my legs and re-cross them. I fold my hands together, and
look at my knuckles to make sure they're not too white. Very
quietly, I clear my throat.

'Ever since the beginning, you and Brian have stuck together.
You've had no choice, have you?'

I really don't like the way this is going, and I really, really don't
like the way I'm handling it. If only Dr Travis were here, to pass
me a glass of water or smooth his cool medical hand over my
forehead. To light a cigarette and hold it to my cracked and bleeding
lips.

But Dr Travis is away this week. At a conference. Hanny told me
that, Hanny who always seems to know far more than I do. Maybe
she indulges in pleasant conversation with him, maybe she chats
away and asks anodyne questions and he tells her things. Ever
since I sat in the narrow hallway at Mrs Wallis's and heard Barbara
conversing with her like an old friend, I've always been amazed at
people who can do that. I can't chat. I can only sword-fight. I am
always
en garde
.

But right now I'm disarmed.

Lorna smiles at me, thinking she's won this round.

'Brian. How would you describe him?'

Actually, my hands are quite a normal colour and my fingers
are relaxed. I flex them in front of me and say, 'We were never
close at all. Circumstance threw us together.'

Lorna bends her head to make a note, smiling as she writes.

'I think, Cora, that we are beginning to get somewhere. At long
last.'

Mike was taking us in Group today. We played the one-word
game, as usual. Find a formula: stick to it. I think that must be the
slogan printed on Mike's coffee mug up in the staffroom.

Strange to say, everyone was quite brief, almost restrained, in
their ramblings and shamblings this morning. Marsupial's word
was 'bedroom' – not strictly an adjective – but Mike's eyes bulged
appreciatively. 'Go on,' he said, clutching both knees and leaning
back and lifting his big shoes right off the floor.

I thought maybe we were plunging into a variant of the game –
if you were a room in your house, which one would it be? – but it
turned out to be just some lengthy garbled disquisition about not
wanting to share a room with her sisters.

'So what would you say you were – frustrated?' he asked, and
then left a meaningful pause. 'And is that what you're feeling like
today?' He must have been having tuition. He's never been so
direct before.

'Oh no,' Marsupial said, most reasonably. 'I was just
saying
.'

Perhaps Marsupial, despite her sighs and the smell of hot
brown soup that escapes whenever she lifts her arms, despite the
complete insanity of her precious, bloated, empty abdomen, was
winding Mike up. Was taking the piss.

Then Mike turned to me. I was startled. What was the word for
the day?

'Despair.'

I didn't mean to say it. It just popped out.

I cannot say we have ever got on well together, education and me.
Eleven years, from five to sixteen, and neither side got much out
of the transaction.

I could read and write and spell and do my numbers well
enough, but not
well enough
, if you see what I mean. Not
well enough to count for anything.

In the eleven-plus, we had an intelligence test. This meant endless
questions where you had to fill in the blank word or add the
missing shape. Most of the time I felt that the only answer I could
give was 'Well, it depends ...' There was no box to tick for 'Well,
it depends ...' There was no space provided to write down my
equivocal reasons. I guess I didn't have the intelligence to pass this
test.

At the secondary modern I was not regarded as anything other
than part of the herd. Everyone who was no one went there, girls
to the buildings on one side of the road, boys to the buildings on
the other. Unlike my junior school, they were not that vigilant
about our presence in class. Perhaps it was a matter of some
relief when the worst pupils failed to show up. We put in a few
years on the treadmill and then were regurgitated at the
other end. If you wanted to do anything fancy, like O levels, or,
heaven preserve us, A levels, you had to go elsewhere. You had
to join the sixth form of the grammar. Hardly anybody ever did.

Nobody at the secondary modern picked me out and uncovered
my special qualities. My work was equally covered in crosses and
ticks, in B-minuses and C-pluses. We did geography, history,
religious instruction, English, maths, a bit of science and a lot of
domestic
science. We did healthy games three times a week. Our
teachers were those not good enough for better schools. They
appeared to be divided into two camps: those who were interested
in their engagement rings and those who were interested in preserving
their virginity. The young ones with a bit of energy and a
gleam in their eye came and went very swiftly. The old monsters
in tweed suits and severe haircuts stayed for ever. I learned to sew
a French seam, and that one should always pin and then tack and
then sew, never just pin and sew; I learned to beat egg whites until
the bowl could be turned upside down without losing any of its
contents, to mould a Swedish meatball, to make pastry – short-crust,
puff and sweet. We drew up menus for a week and studied
the finer points of bringing up a baby: fresh air, regular naps,
everything sterilized. All this, together with subject and predicate,
photosynthesis, the major exports of India, the lineage of all those
Tudors and Stuarts, with a dusting of long division and algebra,
was enough to fit us for our futures. Our futures as wives and
mothers and Woolworth's salesgirls. Factory fodder. Maybe even
Gough Electricals fodder.

I have never since sewn a French (or double) seam, or made, or
even eaten, a single Swedish meatball. I know of no one who has.
My mother, who made plenty of her own clothes and ours, didn't
hesitate to sew straight from the pins; she couldn't be bothered to
fuss with tacking and then to fuss with taking the tacking out. No
one has ever come up to me and asked me the value of
c
if (
a
+ 2)
× (
b
– 3) = 2
c
when
a
= 4 and
b
= 5. I must say, I sometimes
wonder to myself was he James the First of Scotland and the Sixth
of England, or James the Sixth of Scotland and the First of
England? But nothing depends on my being able to answer this
except my own irritation. I know that a horse chestnut leaf has
five, or alternatively seven, leaflets, and a buttercup five petals, but
any curious person could get hold of the real thing and count, if
they had a mind to do so. And I have never, ever, had to fill in the
missing shape.

I got my education elsewhere.

Yet Lorna has said to me that I have (a) a wide vocabulary, and
(b) a sharp mind, and what she hints at is: where did I get them
from? Well, you can't inherit a wide vocabulary from a parent or
parents you left behind at the age of one. So I must have used my
sharp mind to pick it up somewhere. Neither nature nor nurture
quite explains me. Maybe that's why Dr Travis sits there and
writes so avidly with his little gold-topped pencil. I am an
interesting study, a case in point.

I ignored my education. It was just a tasteless meal placed
before me, something I had to eat before I could get down.
Everyone involved was too witless to see my finer points. Why
should I help them out? So I looked and listened and picked up
and absorbed. You can get a lot just by absorbing. Maybe that's
what I would have learned in science if our science lessons had
gone a little further.

What I looked at and listened to was
life
. When I could get hold
of any. And I read books, too, of course. Plenty of books.
Thousands of books.

The value of
c
is 6, by the way. Not that anyone's asking.

My mother has a photograph, one of those whole-school photographs,
taken when I was in the first year at the secondary mod.
Had a photograph – perhaps I should say
had
. I doubt they've
kept it, treasured it. I doubt they've kept anything. Swept the place
clean. My books, my pyjama case, the puppy and kitten print
from my bedroom wall. I wonder what happened to them? All
erased, as if I had never been?

It takes a long time to pick me out in the photograph, out of the
hundreds of monochrome faces. We were arranged in rows,
seated on the grass, seated on low benches, then standing on the
grass, then standing behind on forms and benches. It took ages to
arrange us all. 'Hands still. Smile please. Say
cheese
,' the
photographer instructed, a professional entertainer's chirrup to
his voice. 'Knees
together
, girls,' hissed the deputy head. My face,
belonging to someone tall for their age, is somewhere in the
middle, somewhere towards the left. Once you have found me, my
shaving-brush bunches, my heavy fringe, give away Bettina's
touch; but the girl beside me has bunches too, longer, a bit darker.
The girl beside me is semi-blinking, glancing down as the shutter
slides, which gives her the look of a dim carthorse. Others are
smiling. There – now that you've got your eye in – further along
is Mildred, and there is Natasha, half hidden behind a teacher's
head. But look away, and it's hard to find us again. You have to
search the rows of faces, find a marker: that teacher with the
candy-floss hair, then go left for Natasha, back and left again, and
– somewhere – there is me.

No one would pick me out from that crowd as special.

My school was not hot on careers advice. Miss Jessop, who had
spent the entire thirty-five years of her adult life teaching religious
education in girls' schools, was responsible for advising us on
possible careers, between a full timetable of RE lessons and sorting
out the Social Service rota. We had to go to see her in groups;
there was no time for individual guidance. We were chopped up
into alphabetical segments and sent along to find out how we
might fruitfully spend the rest of our lives. Careers advice took
place – there was no other space for it – in the medical room. The
white enamel wall cabinet with the large red cross on it, the
tingling smell of witch hazel, the big clean sink, lent a serious air
to proceedings. So one day early in the summer term Mary Batty
and Kay Bell and Christine Boyd and I found ourselves sitting on
hard chairs in front of Miss Jessop, who looked uncomfortable
and said, 'Well, girls, what did you have in mind?'

It was the you-tell-me variety of careers advice.

'Where does your experience lie?' Miss Jessop asked, and I said,
'The retail trade. Haberdashery. Knitwear.' I wasn't going to
mention the sanitary products. Mary Batty helped in her dad's
paper shop, and Kay Bell had sold ice creams on the prom, and
Christine Boyd had done nothing at all (her mother was an
invalid).We turned faces full of expectancy towards Miss Jessop,
who fumbled with her yellow pearls. She had a manila folder in
front of her on the table. A thin manila folder. 'Well, girls ...' she
began.

Perhaps Christine was hoping in her wildest dreams to be a
nurse, and Kay fancied travelling to India in a hippie van, and
Mary thought her dad should expand the shop – with her
assistance – into prams and babywear. And I was definitely waiting
to be plucked, inevitably, from the crowd, to be whisked away
to London to take up my life as a single girl and to have fun. We
didn't say any of this. To say it would have been to embarrass Miss
Jessop further, to embarrass ourselves.

'Well, girls,' said Miss Jessop, toying with the folder but not
opening it. 'You have some useful experiences behind you. I
would advise you to start looking in the Situations Vacant
column, to put your names down with firms who ...'

I stopped listening. I watched the fluttering shapes of leaf
shadows dancing over the table in front of Miss Jessop, and over
Miss Jessop herself, transparent, carelessly dancing shadows,
where the sun shone down through the lime tree that grew outside
the window of the medical room. I drifted in and out of the
sound of her voice. Words like 'loyalty' and 'punctuality', phrases
such as 'good attendance record', 'many local businesses', and
'... may not need any exams', leaped above the surface of my
consciousness like flying fish, only to disappear without trace,
without meaning, again. I stared at the first-aid cabinet and
wondered how much it must weigh, and what would happen if it
suddenly fell off the wall and on to Miss Jessop's head. Somewhere
in the branches of the lime tree, a blackbird started singing. And
I felt, for the very first time, that I would not mind staying
here
for
ever, in the safe smell of wood varnish and witch hazel, drifting in
and out of listening, with the summery leaf shadows always playing
over me.

'Remember, girls,' Miss Jessop said, sharply, as outside the
medical-room door the afternoon lesson bell shrilled. 'When
approaching a prospective employer, always dress neatly and
respectably, always behave like young ladies. Always mention any
useful experience.'

Kay Bell became a go-go dancer eventually, so I heard. Prancing
about in the beer spills on a bar, dressed in tight black shorts and
a red satin blouse, knotted just under the bosom. I wonder if she
bore Miss Jessop's advice in mind as she approached her sausage-fingered
future employer?

I shouldn't be so wicked. I got
my
job by following Miss Jessop's
advice, although it was a route I could have worked out for myself.
I bought the local paper and looked in the Sits Vac column. I was
all ready to mention my useful experience in the world of
haberdashery to the area manager, who agreed that I should 'pop
in for an interview teatime-ish' the following Tuesday. He was on
the telephone in the tiny back room when I arrived and he
remained on the telephone throughout our short conversation.

'Look, Shirley – I know all about Ipswich,' he said, and flagged
me into the room with one big arm. His suit jacket was light beige
with a very faint check. One of the cuff buttons was loose and
there was a mark on the sleeve. I was already practising applying
my observation skills to the world of dry cleaning. 'Shirley,' he
said, 'I'm not talking small-fry here.'

He nodded to me, and pushed some paper and a pen towards
me. A telephone message pad, a bright yellow Bic.

'I know, I
know
,' he told Shirley, in the tones of a man who
wished he didn't. 'I know all about that. Believe me.' He cupped
one hand over the receiver and mouthed at me: 'Just fill in your
details, love. The salient points.'

You tell me, I thought.

'Look, Shirl, there's nothing that
you
can tell
me
. I know. I saw
the offending item with my own eyes. Name, address, national
insurance number,' he added, in a throttled whisper, nodding at
me. I stood to write. There was no room to sit down, and he was
in the only chair. A wrinkling cup of coffee waited on the Formica
desktop before him. 'No, no, Spiller's had it, Shirley. Take it from
me, the man in the know. How old are you?' he asked me, frowning.
'Sixteen
when
? Write it down. Date of birth. Dee-oh-bee,' he
added, as if in explanation, stabbing at the message pad with
a forefinger. He picked up the coffee, elbow out, and sipped a
mouthful, ignoring the skin that came with it. 'Spiller is
yesterday's man
, Shirley, my darling. Ipswich or no Ipswich. Take
it from me.' He laughed, a loud, brigandish ha-ha, like a crackle of
lightning over the wireless. There was phlegm in his lungs. The
dry-cleaning fluid, maybe. 'Ever worked behind a counter before?'
he asked me, and I nodded, beginning to speak, when he suddenly
crowed, 'Shirl! If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times,
Spiller's a dead man. No objection to working Saturdays?' he
added, in a low voice. 'No? Well, a pleasure to do business.'
He swapped the receiver over as Shirley's voice ranted out of it,
and extended his right hand to me. 'When can you start?' In two
weeks, I said. After my exams, after my birthday, when school
would chuck me out with a grateful sigh.

Which was how I passed the rigorous selection process for the
job.

'Bed-wetter, cat-getter, fire-setter,' I suggested to Hanny the other
day.

'
What?
'

'Haven't you ever heard that phrase?' I asked. But she hadn't. For
someone so well-travelled and worldly-wise, she's led a sheltered life.
'It's what they say about children who later on turn out to be bad.
How you can tell.'

I gave her a long look, but she was just staring at the flower
beds, at the red busy Lizzies which are now all in bloom.
Screaming bright-red busy Lizzies. Under the glare of a grey
summer sky they are migraine-inducing.