The Private Parts of Women (2 page)

Inis holds up her mug.

‘Go on, keep me company. You needn't worry,' Trixie adds, ‘I'm not the sociable type. You won't know I'm here as a rule – only I thought I'd make myself known.'

Inis looks at her properly for the first time. ‘All right then, thanks.' She pushes open the rickety wooden gate between them.

Inside it is dim. There is a sweet rank stench Inis can't immediately identify. The electric-fire is burning, an orange slash in the dullness. The television flickers, a cookery programme, a Chinese chef. Trixie turns down the sound.

‘Sit yourself down,' she says. The imitation sheepskin by the fire makes Inis sad. No reason except that she is prone to sadness. A quick hand shreds chicken on the screen.

‘Do you like cooking?' Trixie asks. ‘If you like Chinese food there's one of those takeaway affairs down the road, I've never tried it myself, not something I particularly fancy.'

Trixie goes into the little offshot kitchen to make the tea and Inis follows her with her eyes. The house is a mirror image of Inis's in design: the sink, the window on the opposite wall so that they can gaze out of their kitchen windows at each other. Trixie sighs and breathes stertorously in the kitchen in the unselfconscious way live-alone people do.

Trixie arranges a tray and carries it precariously through. Two elderly best cups and saucers full of pale, slopping tea, a plate of biscuits, an embroidered tray-cloth.

‘How nice,' Inis says. The cups are white with green leaves on them and a worn gold rim. The handles are gold too, they look delicate and snappable.

‘You'll find I'm not much of a one for company,' Trixie says. They sit and sip their tea watching the silent sizzling on the screen. ‘Television's company though,' she says. ‘Don't know what I'd do without my telly.'

‘I haven't got one,' Inis offers.

‘Oh dear …'

‘By choice,' Inis says.

‘Busy I expect.' Trixie grates the bottom of her cup across the saucer, pours the slops back into the cup and drinks them.

They lapse into silence again. Trixie looks captivated by the chef spinning a nest of golden hairs out of melted sugar. Her eyes are very bright with the television light in them and little puckered purses stand out under each one. Inis eats a soft petticoat-tail and looks round the room. On the window-sill is a row of yoghurt pots full of spindly seedlings, craning towards the light. There's a piano against the opposite wall, covered in a chenille cloth and on top of it a glass fruit bowl full of pink breakfast grapefruit and pale green apples. There are sepia photographs in dark frames, she can't see the detail, posed figures. There are three hyacinths in a white china bowl. That's what the smell is, hyacinth breath stifled and baked in the electric heat. One of the blooms is strong and fat, fully open, glimmering white; one slimmer, a little behind in its development; the third has lost the fight for root space, it is only a puny thing, loose in its green sheath. They are as competitive as people, Inis thinks, those hyacinths in the bowl.

BOY

It is time to come out

I have been asleep but now I am awake

I want to come out now and … I don't know what

I don't know how

I am shouting to Trixie and moving my arm

She will not hear me

I am stuck in Trixie

And she will not know

LIAR

I make a speciality of not remembering. I have done for years but now … It's like my will power is unravelling. What is it about that girl? Inis, bizarre name. Nothing sort of a name. In. Is. She has stirred me up. Ever since she went home the memories have been flocking. It's something about the look in her eyes, something familiar and lost. She does remind me of someone – it's a proper tease, that's what it is, a conundrum.

I should never have asked her in. Not grateful. Not friendly, not particularly. Not that I want friends, but a smile wouldn't go amiss. I've noticed how mean they are with smiles, these days, the young. I want to shake them by the shoulders sometimes, the sulky louts, and say,
What's the matter with you? A smile costs nothing
. Although I never will.

Not that
Inis
is all that young.

The television is on loud to try and drown my thoughts and it's my quiz, ‘Countdown'. You make the longest possible word from nine random letters against a hectic ticking clock and I can do it well, usually I can, sometimes I beat the contestants. I've even thought of sending up my name and taking part but I would never really do such a thing, never in a month of Sundays. Then you have to do a sum, I'm not so good at that. Sometimes Blowski comes to join me at this time, for a cup of tea and ‘Countdown', but I always beat him, well he is a Pole and never has caught on properly to English words.

Memories are rarely good, Trixie Bell. Best to steer clear, live in the present, by far the best way.

But coming to in the pantry my mouth stuffed full of raisins; stinking stuff smeared on the walls and my fingers dirty; a torn skirt; suddenly being in a strange street alone with no hand to hold; a stinging leg; a huge face pushed into mine, shouting, shouting. Flecks of spittle.

Because always there were absences.

Sometimes I dream about dark and soft stuff in my face, everything cool and thick and dusty so I think I will choke, beating my hands against fur and cloth. No light or air.

I did not know it is not like this for everyone.

Now I am one. I am healed.

But there
were
the gaps. Somehow I would part from myself and come to somewhere I shouldn't have been. Sometimes I'd come to and find myself in the corner; sometimes a stain on my clean dress; a foul taste in my mouth, a scrape on my knee.

Gaps then but not clean. I try not to remember. When I would come back it was like trying to remember a dream. Only the
feeling
is left, a trace of sensation, dim memories. No. I don't mean memories exactly, something more like a finger prodding inside my soft brain, something physical.

I was a bad girl. Somehow I was and there was guilt. Bad things happened: marzipan went missing, the cherries from the trifle. Someone scribbled on the wall. Father's letters got thrown away. A bite was taken from every apple in the bowl.

No, it was not like dreaming. You don't get in trouble for dreaming. You don't get accused of lying. They always called me a liar, before I even knew what the word meant. ‘You
did
it, Trixie,' Mother's face too close to mine. ‘Useless to lie, we
know
. You are a liar.' Useless to protest. The unfairness battered about inside me like something wild in a box. But I kept my mouth shut, I did learn that, for whatever I said would only make things worse.

I was a still and silent child. Indeed I was afraid to move. I tried so hard to be good and sweet and silent. Usually, I wore white. I sat with my feet together and my hands in my lap. I tried to be seen and not heard. I only ever wanted to be good.

When I was five my father went to France to fight. My mother thought he would never come back. She took me to be photographed on my sixth birthday, a photograph to send to him. In it, my eyes are huge and frightened, my mouth so small it is only a dot. The thing was battering inside me. The dress, the special dress that Mother had knitted me for the occasion, all thin and lacy gossamer wool was stretched and baggy as if I had stretched it over my knees which Mother had warned me not to do. I did not do it and yet the dress was stretched. My leg was stinging where she'd slapped me. She was glaring at me from behind the photographer and whatever he said, that man, I could not smile or watch the birdie: there was no birdie to watch. There I stood in my sagging, ruined dress and my mother's eyes burned at me, promising punishment.
Your poor father out there risking his life for King and Country and you can't even keep yourself decent
… And there I am still, caught in a frame and terrified, my hands screwed into fists at my sides. The photograph has darkened after all those years, is stained, as if the badness has seeped out. And Father came home anyway, before it could be sent. Discharged for his bad nerves.

All my childhood, I was frightened to move. I hardly did a thing. And yet the evidence of my badness was forever there. I would try so hard to be still and silent but suddenly there I'd be with a trailing hem and bits of twig caught in my hair. ‘I didn't do it,' I used to say before I learned better. ‘I didn't, I haven't …
I
didn't do it.' And they would get so terribly angry and their breath would be hot in my face. ‘The evidence is
here
,' they might shout. ‘As if it's not bad enough that you do these things … but then against all the evidence to deny them! It defies reason.'

It hurt me so much that they wouldn't believe me. But then, who on God's earth would?

‘The girl's an imbecile,' Father might say.

‘The Devil's in her,' Mother might add.

And then there were the punishments.

WHITE

Now all the walls are white. The bedroom looks all right, the bathroom too because it is mostly grey tiles mottled with white anyway. The white painted over a crust of mould makes it bright. It might come through again, the black mould, but I don't care. It's temporary this, little boxy, two-up, two-down, attic, offshot. Like a doll's house, pretend.

I love the smell of emulsion paint. It is almost delicious and just for the odd moment when I was painting, I was almost absorbed, almost, when I could just
do
it, let my hand roll the oozing foam roller to and fro, listening to the licky sticky sound of paint. I would not even begin to approach the word happy, but I was almost content.

In the sitting-room though, the wallpaper flowers loom through the whiteness no matter how many coats I do. The old paper that looked so well stuck on I couldn't face stripping it, has bubbled away from the wall. It looks awful blisters and bruisy flowers. How Richard would scoff. The Indian bedspread I've used as a curtain, tacked to the frame so you can't draw it back, but who wants to look out? Looks OK. In the evening, with the gas-fire lit and a brass-based lamp I found in a skip, it looks all right. It looks possible. It's only in the daytime when light forces itself through the rusty cotton weave that it appears amateurish – no, what do I mean? It does look pretend.

I look in the bathroom mirror, it's still a shock to see my new white-haired self. I've had long chestnut brown hair ever since I was about two.
Lovely hair
all my lovers and friends have always said, and my parents' friends, stroking,
so glossy, such a colour with the sun on it
. And now it is short and no colour at all. When I got home from the hairdresser's and looked in the mirror I saw I had little flecks of dark hair stuck to my face, gathered in little drifts under my eyes. My eyebrows looked heavy and too dark for the first time so I began to pluck them, but it made me sneeze, made my eyes water again. All the stinging, all the little trivial physical tears. I wanted to pluck my eyebrows because I thought fine brows would look better with my short white hair. You see? There I go again, wanting to look better which is a step towards prettier, which is a lie.

I am a terrible woman. I have done a terrible thing. I have left my children. A month ago I was a mother now I am not. Though that is not absolutely true. Once you have been a mother you can never stop being one, not entirely, whatever happens, because becoming a mother does something … does something to your soul. But in
practice
I am not a mother any more.

I have brought with me some clothes, some photographs, my cameras, some rolls of film I shot in the last weeks. I have left behind two precious children and a man I cannot blame. He is a terrible man, terribly good, patient, understanding. I left the children in front of ‘Fantasia' on the video recorder; I left a note which tried to explain; I left my door-key and my sad reflection in the hall mirror. I left the house tidy, bleach in the toilets, the freezer stuffed, milk in the fridge. I left friends who will be hurt and angry that I never confided the despair I felt. But then I did not know I felt despair. It was just that it reared up one day without warning. Oh yes I had been miserable, depressed, Richard thought, but I was also safe, appreciated, loved.

Somehow I couldn't stand it.

And now I am here in this white painted dump. The only room that is not white is the attic. I have curtained off a section for a darkroom – fortunately there is a basin up there. It is a perfect space. I've invested in new equipment, delivered yesterday. So I am set up. I will not waste time. I want to work. Looking at whatshername – Trixie – today I thought I might ask her if I could take some pictures. Her face is beautifully old and she has a sort of dignity. All the same there's something not quite right about her, the way she drifts off. But thank Christ I've not landed up next door to a family, other people's kids. That I could
not
stand.

‘You are greedy,' Richard said to me once, long ago, before the children.

‘Greedy?' I didn't understand. We were in Greece, on a ferry travelling between islands. He was basking in the sunny slop of light, I was squinting through my camera lens at plush green feathers of Cyprus against the intense blue sky.

‘Why don't you just enjoy it?'

‘I
am
enjoying it.'

‘Why don't you put your camera down? Just look and let it go. You never just
look
. You always have to try and
keep
it.'

I laughed at him and went on clicking. The wind got up as we moved out into the open sea and I photographed Richard leaning over the ship's rail, his hair blowing, a spray of rainbow prisms behind him. We were in love and he was always teasing me. I took no notice. But now I see what he meant and partly agree. I do have this habit, that infuriates him, of lifting up my hands, angling my two forefingers and thumbs into a rectangle through which to frame a scene. Even without my camera, to impose edges. Now my memory is composed of rectangles.