Living In Perhaps (3 page)

Lorna's had another go at asking me to describe my home. She's
persistent, I'll give her that.

I said, 'It's a big white house, with a big garden. There are lawns
and paths and flower beds. There's a long line of steps down from
the front door to the gate. The slope is very shallow. There are a
hundred and twenty steps, but only in sets of five. Five steps and
then a flat bit, then another five steps.'

'Do you often count things, Cora?'

She always calls me that. It's just a name on a piece of paper, it
isn't me. I've half a dozen other names I'd prefer. I'd like to say,
'Don't call me that,' but I think that's what she wants. What she's
after. To get a rise out of me, to get me to say something I really
mean. So I don't. I just look steadily back at her when she uses
that name. I don't even blink.

'Only sheep,' I replied.

'It must be a very
big
garden,' Lorna said. 'I make that forty sets
of steps.'

Either she's innumerate or she's trying to catch me out. I tend
to think the former.

'Yes, it is a big garden,' I replied. 'There are yellow tulips, and
white seats to sit on.' I wondered how much detail I could go into
before she realized. 'My favourite seat is by a sundial,' I said.

But, actually, she has never come out into the garden here with
me. When you go outside you always have to be with a member
of staff, or in sight of one, at least. Lorna has never come and sat
with me in front of the sundial, and looked down the path
between the long beds of yellow tulips.

But every day she must climb the hundred and twenty steps,
the
twenty-four
sets of five steps, to come to her place of work.
And not notice them? Now, that is what I call unobservant.

That spring, when I turned nine, I started piano lessons. It was a
very Carolyn sort of thing to do. I'd badgered away at them to let
me. We had an old upright piano, black as ebony, standing there
useless in the lounge. It had come from my mum's own mother's
house, apparently, along with the noisy pendulum clock on the
mantelpiece and the convex mirror above it, a circular eye that
made your top half bulge weirdly when you peered up into it. All
these things were
old
. Old was not desirable, or attractive. They
only kept them out of sentiment, and a sense of duty. They liked
things spick and span and new; things they had chosen themselves
from the big stores in town; at least then you knew where
they had been. The piano took up space, and always needed dusting,
and nobody could play it. 'Why not?' I kept on. 'Why not,
please
?'

My mother took me the first time. We walked. The roads round
our way are flat, and perfectly straight, laid out on a grid pattern.
I was surprised to find that the house where I was to have piano
lessons was just like other houses. I had imagined it would be
enormous and grand. The sound of musical instruments would
drift out from tall, open windows. There ought to be huge trees
around it, and hedges and lawns, and a wide flight of stone steps up
to the front door. I didn't recall imagining this beforehand; it was
just that when we got to the little pebble-dashed semi I realized that
that was what I'd expected. Not a concrete path, rose bushes snicked
down to their knuckles, and a holder for milk bottles in the porch
with a dial to tell the milkman how many to leave.

My mother rang the bell. The door was opened just a foot wide
by someone who peered round it suspiciously: a youngish
woman, dumpy, with rollers in her hair. Was this the musical
type?

'I'll take you through to Mum,' she muttered.

We squeezed awkwardly round the door and into the narrow
hallway. A big pushchair took up most of the space. I noticed a
little boy at the back of the hall. He was bumping a push-along toy
crossly against the skirting board.

We were shown into the front room. The piano was there,
along with a dining table piled with folded ironing, a mirror
engraved with flowers, a kitten calendar on the wall. So disappointingly
domestic
.

Another dumpy woman, much older, dressed in a grass-green
Crimplene frock, turned round to us from the piano bench. She
looked like anyone you might see walking down our road,
pegging out washing, getting off a bus.

'So this is Carol. I'm Mrs Wallis.'

I gave her a tight smile. My mother hovered, somewhere
between the ironing and the mirror.

Mrs Wallis pointed to the bench, and I sat down. She showed
me how to find middle C, which I already knew. And so we began.

If someone was having a lesson when you arrived, you waited
on a seat in the dark hallway. The busy times were after school on
weekdays and on Saturday mornings. The little boy could sometimes
be heard crying, or his mother shouting, or someone would
run noisily up the stairs. All quite thrilling, compared to our
house. Mrs Wallis, when she heard these things, would sigh
between clenched teeth. She had large hands which she brought
down firmly on my hands, and later, when I got on to the pedals,
she would sometimes press down with her foot on my foot. It was
an odd way of being guided, like being crushed. And you couldn't
do anything right under her physical force, you couldn't find the
right place because you were just held there, and the next time, on
your own, it would be back to guesswork, as usual.

*

But I met Barbara at the piano teacher's. She was sitting in the hall
one day when I arrived. 'I know you,' she said. 'You live next door
to us.'

I was astounded. I didn't recognize her at all.

'You live next door to us in Cromer Road. You live in the
bungalow. The one with the windmill.'

She was right. There was a model windmill in one of the front
garden beds. I omitted to mention it when I described the garden.
It wasn't quite a garden gnome; it was a windmill.

'I don't know
you
,' was all I said.

'I'm Barbara Hennessy,' she told me, as if that would jog my
memory. I shook my head. Upstairs there was a crash, and a wail.
In the front room a rendering of 'The Bells of St Mary's' fell apart
and then carried, falteringly, on.

'She's not married, you know,' Barbara said with a glittering
look, glancing at the ceiling. 'All the parents think they're being
dead brave and compassionate sending their kids here for piano
lessons. Helping Grandma pay the bills.'

None of this made any sense to me, but I loved the way her face
assumed a wicked expression. Maybe I'd never seen a wicked
smile before. I asked her if she had a lesson next but she said she
was just there to pick up some music. Her lessons were usually on
Saturday mornings, and this was a Tuesday. I was relieved, in a
way, because if she had a lesson booked I was sure she had
more right to it than I, who also had one booked then. I
had never waited with anyone else on that uncomfortable seat
before.

She went in to collect her music. I heard her voice, to and fro
with the piano teacher's, just like two adults having a conversation.
She came out, smiled at me, said, 'I'll see you around,' and
then, at the front door, 'What's your name?'

I slurred it. I tried the Carolyn trick. Perhaps it would
work.

*

Later my lessons were changed to Saturday mornings. My mother
had stopped accompanying me by then; it took up too much of
her time. I walked there on my own.

I went in as Barbara came out. She always smiled at me. Then
one day she was still there after my lesson. Not on the seat, but in
the road outside.

I came out into the sunshine and turned right on to the
chipped asphalt pavement. Barbara appeared from a gateway,
from between hedges: an apparition. She had on a red tartan kilt,
a cream woolly jumper. Her hair was messy and loose and fell into
her face. A kilt and a cream jumper and messy hair were suddenly
my aspirations in life.

'Are you going home?' she asked, and we walked together. My
heart was bumping with excitement in my chest, and I must have
had a stupid grin on my face all the way back to Cromer Road.
Because Barbara had waited, expressly for
me
.

I've just met someone, the first person I've encountered in this
place who isn't a zombie. Thank God. I was getting jolly lonely.
Her name is Hanny Gombrich, which is another good thing.

I like to have a friend, an accomplice.

They've put me down for Activity.

That's what they do here. You don't
choose
an activity, or
do
an
activity. You get put down for it.

Mike came into my room and told me. 'Come on, Carol. You
can't stay here all day. I've put you down for
Activity
.'

His voice is falsely jolly. I can see from the look in his eyes that
he's afraid I won't go along with it, won't go along with all the
enthusiastic suggestions about chats and activities and time for
tea. And what if I don't? Then he'll have to use an alternative
method of persuasion. I've seen a few examples of that already:
not a pretty sight. So I get up off my bed and follow him. Besides,
I'm curious.

I can't imagine what kind of activity it will be that scrupulously
avoids the use of scissors, knives, needles and pins, thread or wire,
or there again, blunt instruments. Every minute of the day in
here, we have to be saved from ourselves. Or each other.

On the way to the back of the building, where Activity takes
place, we walk down a corridor beside a courtyard. I've never
been down here before. In the yard two washing lines are strung
with tea towels and plain, white, functional-looking aprons.
They're flapping and struggling in the wind. For some reason that
makes me feel happy. Maybe because they look as if at any second
one of them might take off. I follow Mike slowly, keeping an eye
on those energetic aprons for as long as I can.

Whatever it was my dad got up to at Gough Electricals, it required
him to wear a blue boiler suit. He had two – one on, and one in
the wash. When I was little I hated to see that man-shaped blue
outfit swinging on the washing line, puffing up in the wind. It
frightened me, made me afraid to go outside. Worse was sometimes
if Dad had a holiday and my mother took the opportunity
to wash the two boiler suits at once. Then they would hang side
by side on the line. It was all too easy for me to imagine a whole
family of brothers who worked at Gough's, a line full of boiler
suits, a human-sized row of cut-out blue paper dollies dancing
their way menacingly down the garden. I wasn't normally a
nervous child, I was just full of fancy, and sometimes the fancies
took me in the wrong direction.

Whatever he needed the boiler suit for, my mother wouldn't let
him go out of the house in it. Boiler suits were not as respectable
as she would have liked him to be. So he took it in a canvas bag,
and set off for work in a white shirt and a brown tartan tie, brown
jacket and cavalry twill trousers. Not quite a suit, not proclaiming
falsely, 'Here is a man in a suit, who goes to work in an office.' But
certainly not overalls. Heaven forbid
overalls
.

Then they invented drip-dry nylon shirts and she bought him
some of those. She was always eager to sample the modern, to find
labour-saving new inventions. He had one white, one blue and
one cream nylon shirt. They billowed disgustingly on the line, like
swollen corpses. The white one soon faded to cream, the cream
one turned nicotine-yellow. The blue one stayed blue. He went
back to his white cotton shirts that Mum had to iron. He wore the
nylon shirts for gardening, sweating away inside them, because
she said they were too good to throw out.

'They're still fit for something,' she said. 'They're not finished
yet.'

They never would wear out. That was how she was.

*

It was
clay
. The Activity was clay.

I haven't touched clay since my last year at junior school. I
haven't smelled that smell – wet and earthy. Gravelike.

They had already cut out our bits of clay for us; they were
taking no chances. Otherwise we might strangle each other with
the cheese-wire or poke our own eyes out. When we came into the
room, the little cubes were already wired off and set on wooden
boards in front of each place at the table. A woman called Dulcie
was running the show. She stood at the front in a clay-smeared
coat, and watched us shuffle in.

'Hello, everybody. Sit down.'

A long pause, while chairs scraped and we glanced resentfully
at each other's bits of clay, to see if they were bigger or
smaller.

'Now, you can make anything you want with your clay, so long
as you use your hands. I want to see those fingers really working!'

We couldn't have those sharp wooden scrapers, the wire-ended
moulders, the neat metal scalpels, that I remembered from
school. You could try to mould a shape using just your fingers, or,
with Dulcie's hovering help, make a pot. Or just tear it up and roll
it into little balls and drop it on the floor, as the woman next to
me did. No one batted an eyelid. It was all Activity.

When I did clay at school we had to make a coil pot. No choice
about it, a coil pot was what you made. The teacher in charge of the
pottery room was very particular. She really didn't like just anyone
getting into her pottery lessons, and so there were only about half a
dozen children who ever progressed beyond coil pots to glazed
animals, and vases, and moulded tiles. Goodness knows how
much money had been spent by the generous county council
on the pottery room and the kiln, but only a handful of kids
benefited.

I couldn't make my coil pot work. The sausages of clay I rolled
dried up so fast that they cracked and broke when I tried to force
them into curves. So that was that – my one and only lesson with
clay. Our class was sent back to drawing on shiny kitchen paper
with blunt pencils, and to another teacher, a trainee, who drifted
between the desks, saying everything we produced was 'Lovely.
Lovely!
'

Rose, the woman next to me in Activity, kept pinching off little
bits of clay and rolling them between the tips of her fingers,
gazing all the while into the air. She dropped the clay balls on to
the floor as if she didn't know what her fingers were doing. They
pinched and rolled and then just – opened themselves. And hey
presto, nothing there! Rose had a huge wart on the back of her
ring finger, just where a diamond in an ostentatious setting would
be. She wore no real rings, of course. (That's the sort of thing they
remove from us, in case we find some fantastically ingenious way
of injuring ourselves: stick our heads through them and hang
ourselves, I would guess.) Rose didn't say a word, but sometimes
a little squeak issued from the back of her throat.

The only activity I've ever been any good at is piano. Legitimate
activity, that is. It took me a long time, but eventually I was good
at those scales, up and down, down and up, my fingers trilling so
fast that you could barely follow the movement, like the whirring
legs of a cartoon animal. I was damned good at 'The Bells of St
Mary's'. I liked everyone to be able to hear me, all through the
bungalow, plinking and plonking away. I liked to think of one of
them coming in and saying, 'Oh, my dear, that was lovely. Now do
play such-and-such for us.' I bet a Carolyn sort of mother would
have said things like that. Encouraging things. Carolyn's
mother would have sat down next to her on the piano stool,
arranging her pleated chiffon skirts, and played a duet, elegant
white fingers rippling like sea anemones over the keys. I bet she
would.

Perhaps I wasn't so good. Perhaps I was dire. Maybe there was
nothing about my playing to admire, except the sheer volume. I
was fond of the loud pedal and had got into the habit of pressing
it down, before Mrs Wallis could press it down for me.

Without even thinking about it, I found I had made a face out
of my clay, a face dominated by a huge nose. A caricature sort of
face. I squashed it up again before anyone could see what it was
and deduce something about me from it.