Shape-Shifter (12 page)

‘How nice it must be to have brains,’ stammered Lily.

Mrs Parrish had turned her head and was smiling at her. Her cheeks were puffy. For a second she reminded Lily of a python.

Outside in the garden, the orange-haired boy had been transformed into a maniac. He had Gloria pinned to the wall with a piece of fence beneath her ribs and was pushing as hard as he could with a fixed grimace. They both were silent. When she could barely breathe, Gloria spoke:

‘My dad is secetary to the Queen.’

The boy suddenly dropped the piece of fence and stomped off down the path, awkwardly as if he was wearing frogman’s flippers, yelling, ‘
YAH. YAH. YAH. YAH
.’

Dr Bartholomew looked at her watch: ‘I have to leave for a Labour Party meeting.’

Every turn of the conversation left Lily more confused. Now the posh-sounding doctor appeared to be a supporter of the working man. Lily thanked God that she had had peritonitis. At least that was something medical to talk about, although Mrs Parrish, an obviously superior woman, had topped her by having had cancer and a miracle cure.

Lily’s head was buzzing as she and Gloria walked home. Dr Bartholomew’s deep inset eyes reminded Lily of the green Mikon Man in Gloria’s comic books. Perhaps she was in touch with the other side. Or had fits. Mrs Parrish was another kettle of fish. Mrs Parrish was how Lily would like to be.

‘Not a piece of carpet on the floor. Not a shred.’

Lily was shouting above the spitting of sausages in the pan as she stood by the stove in the dilapidated scullery. George Johnson sat quietly at the table waiting for his supper, his finger-nails still dirty from work at the power station although he had scrubbed his hands. Gloria bobbed up and down in front of the mirror putting beetroot juice on her lips for lipstick.

‘There was not.’ Lily continued as if some invisible person had contradicted her. ‘Not one stitch. Bare boards. No rugs. Nothing. Not even a mat to brighten the place up. She’s not a proper doctor with a surgery. She goes round schools or something. That Mrs Parrish is a lovely woman. She had one of those miracle cures for cancer. She was very ill and then all her genes got together and her blood changed and she got better.’

Lily watched George as he ate. Strands of greasy, toffee-coloured hair hung over his forehead as he shovelled the food into his mouth. She wondered what it would be like to be sitting opposite Dr Parrish. There would probably be a glass of sherry, a white linen tablecloth and perhaps a silver entrée dish with some weird vegetable like broccoli.

She pinned up Gloria’s plaits and put her in the tin bath in front of the Ideal boiler. Gloria kept her left arm sticking out so as not to let the transfers wash off. Soap turned the water milky. The side of the bath nearest to the fire was getting too hot. Gloria clung to the other side:

‘What do you want f’yer birthday, mum?’ she asked.

‘I want a packet of hairpins and a hairnet. That’s what I want more than anything else in God’s world.’ Lily winked at George who took out his wallet.

‘’Ere Lil. Something for y’birthday.’ He pressed the money into her hand and squeezed it so tight she couldn’t tell how much was there. She looked down. Two pounds.

‘Oh you shouldn’t’ve.’ George looked embarrassed so Lily changed the subject.

‘What do you think to this red lino?’

‘Makes the place look like a slaughterhouse,’ said George.

That night, Lily turned away from her husband’s body which was burning hot as he slept, like the furnaces he stoked all day, and moved to the cool edge of the bed. Once asleep, she dreamed she was standing in the middle of a road on top of a hill. She was holding with difficulty the entire front section of an ambulance. Speeding towards her, its emergency bell ringing, was an ambulance with no front. She knew she was supposed to fit the front on as it reached her. As the white vehicle loomed towards her she stepped forward and fitted the missing section into position. As she did so, the top of the ambulance flew open and out sprang Mrs Parrish, like a Jack-in-the-Box, swinging backwards and forwards and smiling bravely.

The next day, Lily collected Gloria from school and they went straight to look in the window of Bon Marché Department Store which was already displaying autumn fashions. On one of the models was a red woollen coat with a trim belt to match and a snazzy black astrakhan collar.
FOXY QUEEN COAT
shouted the label. Two pounds ten shillings. Lily calculated that with the birthday money and what she would be able to save from the housekeeping she could afford it. They had told her at the hospital that she must not return to waitressing in the café for at least three months, but she should be able to get the extra ten shillings although it would mean Gloria doing without the patent leather shoes she wanted. A gust of hot wind blew grit into Gloria’s eye. Lily spat on her handkerchief and got it out. Then the two of them walked down Coldharbour Lane to the Golden Domes cinema where Gloria had lost her gloves the week before. Lily reckoned she couldn’t last the winter without a coat.

‘They were white cotton gloves with a strawberry pattern on them like little hearts. I dunno how she lost them. They were threaded on a bit of elastic through her coat.’ Lily was yelling through the plastic front of the kiosk to a hunch-back woman with thick pebble glasses who sat in a mountain of sweets, cigarettes and Kia-Ora orange juice. Lily threw a warning look at Gloria who was walking around in circles pretending she had a club foot. The woman opened a couple of drawers half-heartedly and shook her head.

‘You are a pest,’ said Lily outside the cinema. And suddenly, she spotted Mrs Parrish. Mrs Parrish stood at the bus stop across the road. She wore a navy-blue linen dress with a red and white striped collar. As she mounted the bus the dress fluttered like a spruce naval flag. Lily took Gloria into the greengrocer’s. It smelled of wood and old vegetables. All the women in there looked like the vegetables they were buying. One woman had the face of a parsnip, etched with the same fine parallel lines; another had a face as bland and thoughtless as a cabbage; a third stood there in a sad, beetroot-coloured coat. Once, in Harrods, Lily had seen women expensively packaged like boxes of Swiss chocolates or elegantly wrapped cakes; women with complexions like the waxed fruits in the Food Hall; women who walked in their own distinctive cloud of perfume. Mrs Parrish is a bit like that, she thought.

Altogether, Lily’s head was so full of Mrs Parrish that it seemed the most natural thing in the world when, the next day, Mrs Parrish stood on Lily’s doorstep:

‘I am most dreadully sorry to ask you, but the bank has shut and I wondered if you could possibly lend me a couple of pounds. I could let you have it back on Monday as soon as the banks open again. I should be so grateful.’

Lily almost ran to the back room for the two pounds she had hidden behind one of the plates on the dresser. What a bit of luck! Normally she would never have that sort of cash to spare.

‘I don’t know how to thank you.’ Mrs Parrish’s eyes were both bright and dull at the same time, as if they had been boiled.

‘Whenever you’re ready. No rush.’ Lily rapped Gloria on the head. Gloria had ducked under her mother’s loosened apron and was poking her head out of the top like a kangaroo in a pouch. The two women exchanged tiny, ladylike waves.

On Monday Lily tidied the front room. She picked the best of the lupins from the back yard and arranged them in two vases. Then she baked a tray of rock cakes. She put them in the front room covered with a damp cloth so they would not dry out. Then she waited. Mrs Parrish did not come. Gloria came home from school and ate half the rock cakes. George arrived home from work. She won’t come this late, thought Lily. She’ll come tomorrow.

Mrs Parrish did not appear on the Tuesday either. Lily became concerned in case she was ill again. She began to fret and snap at Gloria. Surely Mrs Parrish couldn’t have forgotten. Two pounds was too much to forget. And then, a few days later, as if the sun had come out, Lily caught sight of the familiar trim figure at the bus stop. Lily twisted the handles of her shopping bag nervously:

‘Oh excuse me, Mrs Parrish. I was wondering if you could give me that two pounds-back.’ She nearly added ‘I’m a bit short’ and then didn’t.

‘I’m so sorry. I haven’t got it on me at the moment. I’ll drop it through your letter-box.’

Mrs Parrish’s puffy cheeks rose in an inscrutably polite smile. Relief flooded Lily.

For the next week or so, every time the letter-box rattled Lily darted to the door. Sometimes she thought she’d heard it rattle when it hadn’t and she would find herself in the dark passageway staring disappointedly at the doormat. The whole business puzzled her. Finally, she plucked up courage to call on Dr Bartholomew.

The doctor opened the door. Her frank smile put Lily at ease. From the back of the house came the sound of children playing.

‘I just called because I haven’t seen Mrs Parrish lately and I was a bit worried in case she was ill again.’

‘On no, she’s fine. In fact, she and her husband had dinner with us last night.’ Dr Bartholomew bent to restrain the over-friendly mongrel dog.

‘I’m so glad,’ said Lily and hesitated. ‘Actually she owes me a little money.’

‘Really?’ Dr Bartholomew laughed. ‘As a matter of fact I think she owes me some too. I’ll remind her if I see her before they go away. They go to Whitstable every year for the summer.’

‘How nice,’ said Lily. ‘Where the oysters come from,’ she added vaguely.

All summer long the sky was blue and cloudless. Twice, Lily walked all the way up the hill to the Parrishes’ house. She peered down the gravel drive trying to catch any sign of life through the latticed windows. Dr Parrish’s car was not in the drive. The house seemed deserted.

Lily brooded ceaselessly over the two pounds. She tried to finish sewing a curtain for the front of the orange-box that was to be Gloria’s bedside table but she couldn’t settle to it. George offered her the money to take Gloria to Southend for the weekend. Consumed with guilt and not able to tell him about it, she refused. Sometimes she thought she would never see the money again. The thought made her sick.

One morning, however, she awoke filled with a sort of wild hilarity. She sat up in the high double bed that nearly filled the room and could not imagine what she had been worrying about. Soon the Parrishes would be back from their holidays and then she would undoubtedly get the money back. George had gone to work. She threw back the sheets and the thin eiderdown. Feeling elated, she dressed and dabbed some perfume the colour of medicine behind her ears. School holidays ended the next day.

‘Gloria,’ she called down the stairs, ‘how about going to Lyon’s for a treat?’

In the cool gloom of Lyon’s Corner House, Lily and Gloria sat on fixed seats at a marble-topped table. Gloria drank her strawberry milk-shake slowly through a straw. Lily ate a Kunzle cake. Mrs O’Sullivan lumbered towards them, tray in hand, her bags bumping against her thighs. As she put her tray on their table she knocked over the dregs of an uncollected cup of tea.

‘Hello, dear. How are you?’ She started to chase her scoop of chocolate ice-cream round the shiny pewter bowl. Lily watched as her mouth worked open and shut like a large purple sea-anenome. ‘I saw that Mrs Parrish call on you a while back. I hope you didn’t lend her any money.’

‘What do you mean?’ She looked anxiously at Mrs O’Sullivan.

‘You’ll never see sight nor sound of it again if you did. She’s borrowed bits and pieces from everybody in the neighbourhood. I meant to warn you.’

Lily’s skin prickled up her arms and across the back of her neck as if she had been stung by a Portuguese Man o’ War:

‘Oh, it was nothing like that. It was just a social call.’

‘Just as well, dear. Be warned.’

‘But why should she do that? They must have money.’

‘I dunno, dear. Nobody knows anybody,’ she said darkly. ‘Not a soul in this world knows what goes on in somebody else’s head. Not a soul.’

Mrs O’Sullivan made her way out, squeezing between tables, holding her bags up in the air to prevent them knocking over people’s cups and saucers and biffing people on the head with them as a result:

‘Sorry, dear. Excuse me, dear. Sorry, dear.’

Lily sat motionless. The huge restaurant seemed to have grown darker. Dimly she heard the steely clatter and clash of cutlery being collected. It sounded like the distant din of a great battlefield. Two women pushing trolleys of dirty cups and plates appeared to be moving with urgency as if they were nurses in a field hospital. Lily felt faint.

‘Let’s go,’ she said to Gloria.

Autumn came fiercely and with it a biting east wind. The days grew shorter. There was no sign of Mrs Parrish. Lily no longer saw her at bus stops or at the shops. She’s changed her haunts to avoid me, thought Lily grimly. And indeed she had. Once Lily spotted her and trailed her all the way to Herne Hill, but just as she called out to her, Mrs Parrish hailed a taxi and sailed off in it leaving Lily to walk home. She began to feel dragging pains in her stomach. Another time, Lily saw the oldest Parrish boy in the street, wearing a pale blue cap that did not belong to any of the schools in the neighbourhood:

‘Excuse me, I’m Mrs Johnson. I wonder if you would be so kind as to tell your mother I’m still waiting for her to call on me.’

‘Certainly,’ replied the mystified youth with overlapping front teeth.

Lily made up her mind to go to the Parrishes’ house and confront the woman. She told George she was going to post a letter. The lights were on in the front of the house. Lily could see a standard lamp behind a chintz-covered sofa. Then it occurred to her that Dr Parrish might answer the door and she would not know what to say. Defeated, she turned and went home. Over the next few weeks she began to dust the window-sill in the front room again and again although it was perfectly clean. Sometimes she just sat all afternoon and watched the rain measling the window panes. And then, one night, George found Lily struggling up the stairs with a full coal scuttle.

‘Where the ‘ell are you goin’ with that?’ He was half-laughing at the bottom of the stairs. Lily stared at the scuttle in disbelief. She had mistaken it for her handbag. She tried to laugh it off but she was shocked.