Scissors, Paper, Stone (14 page)

Charlotte nodded her head in what she hoped was a non-committal show of understanding. She sat up in bed, positioning the pillow behind her back and flattening the folds of the duvet over her lap so that Charles could put the tray down in front of her. She saw that he had made her two slices of undercooked toast and sliced them each in half – into rectangles, not the triangles you got in hotels. He had slotted them into a silver toast rack that Charlotte had never seen before. Normally she had her toast in a single slice, buttered with a thin sliver of Marmite on top. Charles had attempted to butter it but because the bread had not been in the toaster long enough, the knife had left slapdash holes in the dough. Big yellow globules dotted the crusts. There was a pot of honey and one of thick-cut marmalade on the side of the tray. He had poured her a glass of water and made her some tea that she hadn’t asked for, incongruously served in a dainty cup and saucer rather than her usual mug.

Although it was not quite what she wanted, Charlotte could see that he had made his own peculiar sort of effort.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She smiled and it felt forced so she relaxed her lips rather too quickly and hoped he hadn’t noticed. She waited for Charles to leave the room and go downstairs. Normally he liked to spend the early evenings catching up on the day’s newspapers in his study and Charlotte knew not to disturb him.

Instead, he took the small velvet-upholstered chair from her desk and drew it up beside the bed. He sat down even though the chair was far too small for him and his gangly limbs were folded up like a big insect, knees touching the edge of the mattress. He seemed all at once to be very close to her and Charlotte felt uncomfortable and then, immediately, ashamed of herself. He was only trying to be nice.

But she found she had a lump in her throat now and didn’t want to eat in front of him.

‘Aren’t you having any?’ Charles asked.

‘Oh. Yes. Lovely.’ Charlotte picked up a limp bit of toast and took a tiny bite. She chewed it for a long time.

Charles was staring at her and she felt his pale blue eyes bore into her like pinpricks of heat. She spread some marmalade on the second slice, taking care to leave the bitter shreds of orange peel in the jar. She bit into it and found that the sweetness tasted good against her tongue. She managed to finish half the toast and the cup of tea. She put the glass of water on her bedside table ‘for later,’ she explained.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, raising her eyes briefly to meet Charles’s silent stare. ‘Just what I felt like.’

He smiled at her, the corners of his lips twisting. Still, he said nothing. Charlotte wasn’t sure what to do. Her arms began to feel cold beneath the thin cotton of her T-shirt nightdress, so she handed him the tray to take away, hoping that Charles would go back downstairs, but instead he took the tray from her and bent down to put it on the carpeted floor. As he sat back up, his hand brushed against her arm.

‘You’re freezing,’ he said, the shadow of his smile still on his lips. He left his hand there and stretched his fingers right round her bicep so that he was holding on to her and she could feel the imprint of his thumb on the soft skin just beneath her armpit.

He’s only being nice, she thought to herself, attempting to quell the rising sensation of unease. She tried to laugh and lighten the atmosphere, but it came out as an awkward, dry choking sound.

‘Mmm. The top half of me feels all cold and the bottom half feels too hot.’

There was a pause.

‘Poor little thing,’ he said and it was such a strange turn of phrase, so entirely unfamiliar in its gentleness, that Charlotte’s heart started to quicken again in her chest. He was not usually the type of father to say paternal things. It felt wrong. It felt somehow menacing.

‘Let’s cool you down.’ He leaned across and slowly drew back the duvet, folding it back at the end of the bed so that Charlotte lay uncovered, her bare legs exposed to the night air. She looked down at her thin ankles, the skin scuffed over the knobbly bone where she had tripped over in the playground at school. She noticed that her nightdress had bunched up around her thighs and she pulled it down as far as it would go. There was an oversized picture of Mickey Mouse on the front that stretched into distorted outlines as she pulled at the hem with both hands. She swallowed and found, to her embarrassment, that she made a loud gulping sound. Still Charles looked at her, his eyes unwavering, his pose both static and monumental. She felt small next to him; small and insignificant.

Now that she had no duvet, Charlotte started to shiver, but she didn’t want to say anything because she was scared of offending him when he had tried so hard to look after her and because she didn’t know what was expected of her. Instead, she started to talk to herself in her head and, after a while, she realised she was praying but it wasn’t her normal prayer. ‘Please, dear God, let everything be all right,’ she was saying to herself, over and over again and slowly, she found herself lulled by the rhythm of repetition.

Charles started to rub his hands up and down her legs. At first, the warmth of it felt nice but then, the pressure of his touch changed perceptibly so that he was no longer rubbing her skin with brisk practicality but rather stroking it, tracing the skinny outlines of her kneecaps with the tips of his fingers. Charlotte flinched involuntarily. Charles looked up at her and his eyes seemed to have acquired a translucent film, as if they were no longer quite focusing on what was in front of him.

‘Ticklish?’ he asked, his voice viscous as treacle. Charlotte nodded, unable to reply. She felt dizzy, as if she was about to cry but had no tears. She didn’t know what was happening or what she should be doing but she knew that, whatever the outcome, she would be a grown-up. She wasn’t going to be babyish. She was a young woman now and had to deal with the unexpected. Perhaps this was all part of the process of becoming an adult. But the thought was not as comforting as she wanted it to be. ‘Please, dear God, let everything be all right.’

Charles’s fingers were edging up her thigh so that she could feel them brushing against the worn elastic of her pants. He’s only trying to be nice, she told herself. His fingers kept stroking: up and down, up and down, up and down. He was no longer looking at her. His head was bent down, his shoulders slouched over the bed and he seemed to be following the progress of his hands with his eyes. There was something at once both intimate and detached about it, as if he were looking at himself playing the piano, watching his fingers stretch to reach the keys of an arpeggio.

And then, something odd happened to Charlotte. The room around her dissolved into blackness and there was nothing left apart from the sound of her own breathing, the beat of her heart and the tight dark sensation of shut eyes and silence. She stopped. She stopped feeling. It was as though her insides detached themselves from her body and then she was being lifted up, floating to the highest corner of her bedroom ceiling, out of harm’s way. She thought of the scene in
Mary Poppins
where the characters found themselves suspended in mid-air, enjoying a cup of tea high up above furniture and the image made her giggle.

She looked down at her own body in her bed and was struck by how tiny she seemed, how faraway and powerless. Her arms were lying slackly on each side and she had pushed her head back against the pillow so that she was looking straight up at the ceiling. Charlotte stared at the shell of her own empty self and felt relieved that she was no longer down there. She felt safe up here.

She could see the top of Charles’s head. She could see his hands moving gently up and down her legs, from the contours of her upper thigh down to the blistered heels. Her nightdress was pushed up over her hipbones, the image of Mickey Mouse wrinkled into countless creases. She lay there tense, rigid, drained of being.

There was the smell of burnt toast.

In the days that followed, Charlotte found that she could not clearly remember what had happened. The evening seemed to smudge in her memory, becoming part of the general blurriness of her remembered illness. It sank into the confusion of fever, into the vivid, too-bright sense of everything having been heightened and slightly surreal. The images seemed to shift and break apart in front of her like eggshell shards in a bowl of gloopy albumen.

The next morning, she woke to find her mother was back
in situ
and her father had gone to work. When he returned in the evening, he seemed back to his distant self, as if nothing had changed. Charlotte was unsure of her own recollections: she could not clearly remember what exactly had gone on and, because of this, she did not want to talk about it with her mother for fear of ridicule.

When she tried to clarify the chain of events in her own mind, she found that she could not put her finger on precisely what had been so terrifying about it. She had been cold and Charles had rubbed her legs to keep her warm. Removed from the immediate context, it seemed to Charlotte that it could have been a perfectly innocent, caring gesture. It was just that it had seemed wrong – both the look he had given her and the sense that he had become something other than himself.

But perhaps she was so unused to his touch that she withdrew from it rather than welcoming it and it was this that was the source of her discomfort. Perhaps she was at fault rather than her father. She began to admonish herself: instead of being worried by his closeness, she should have been mature enough to receive his affection in the spirit that it was intended. He was unused to showing his love, she thought, which was why, when he tried, there was a vague unease about it.

She ended up thinking that she should have made the most of Charles’s undivided attention, an attention she normally craved but felt ill equipped to deserve. Usually, she never felt clever enough in answer to his questions across the supper table. She never knew how to impress him or make him laugh. She was never quite entertaining enough to divert him and she felt the pressure of this enormously.

Generally, Charles would talk to her in adult terms – explaining a complex scientific theory he’d read about in the paper or holding forth on his latest political opinions – and he would expect adult answers that she could never give him. She felt that she let him down, each unanswered question becoming a small admission of her own failure.

And now, here he was being nice to her, being attentive and tactile and unquestioning and actually looking after her – all the things she most wanted – and instead of being pleased, she was upset!

So although there was much she did not understand about the adult world around her, Charlotte steeled herself to accept its occasional confusions with grace and intelligence. This, she felt, would set her apart from other children. This, she knew, would meet with her parents’ approval.

And, the more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself that, after all, there was nothing so very wrong in what her father had done.

That was the first time.

Janet; Anne

Janet had got tickets. And when Janet had got tickets, it meant there was simply no escape. She was one of the most efficient bookers and makers of reservations that Anne had ever encountered. No sooner had Janet heard a play mentioned on the radio or read about a forthcoming museum exhibition in the paper, than she got straight on to the phone to call the relevant box office, credit card details at the ready, pen and paper beside her in order to jot down the reference number.

Janet didn’t like those new automated voice systems where you had to speak loudly into a computer. She took delight in telephonic exchanges, drawing the person on the other end of the line into meaningless conversation about the terrible weather they were having.

By the time she put down the phone, Janet felt that a rightful order had been restored to the world. She would fish out her diary from her eco-friendly canvas-weave shopping bag, flick through the months until she got to the correct day and then she would write in the details of this new event in small, precise handwriting. Her days were delineated in black ballpoint, each one wrapped up like presents to be opened, and dotted at regular intervals through the year in order to eke out maximum pleasure. It left her with a sense of calm satisfaction – she had done something: she had arranged An Outing.

Needless to say, Janet always booked two tickets. She convinced herself this was an altruistic gesture – she would bestow a treat on an appreciative friend – but, if she was being really honest with herself, it was more a way of ensuring companionship. People felt less ready to turn down an invitation if there was money involved, and the lure of a free ticket was often enough to make even the most reluctant guest say yes.

But Janet was not overburdened with friends to ask, so the tickets often went to nieces or nephews who would slouch around galleries with her out of a barely concealed sense of duty. Sometimes, the second ticket went to waste. Once, she had been forced into the undignified position of attempting to sell a ticket for a sold-out musical outside the theatre. She found herself surrounded by touts, each one in a large black puffer jacket and knitted hat, shouting out their wares like market traders.

‘You all right, love?’ one of them asked, hawking up a globule of phlegm and spitting on to the pavement. Janet shrank back in disgust.

‘Oh, oh, yes, thank you,’ she stuttered, feeling so embarrassed and out-of-place that she almost started crying.