by Isla Dewar
*
Two days later the woman with purple hair and a tattooed snake slithering up her arm spoke to Anna.
‘Are you Mrs MacLean?’
‘Mrs no, MacLean yes.’
She was setting out on her morning walk. It was part of her recovery. Her doctor told her it helped her exercise her new hip. She’d be walking normally in no time. She leaned on her stick and considered this woman standing before her. The tattoo was impressive and now, as the woman wore torn denim shorts, she could see there was a further tattoo snaking down her left leg. Anna stared at it.
‘Took hours,’ said the tattooed one. ‘Long time to lie still.’
Anna nodded. ‘I expect it was. You are?’
‘Marla Jones. I’ve been watching you.’
‘I noticed.’
‘You don’t go out to work.’
‘I have retired.’
‘What from?’
‘I edited a small poetry magazine and often on Saturdays I worked in an independent bookshop. The extra money helped.’ Before she was asked about her present income, she said, ‘I have a tiny pension from the magazine and the state pension. I get by. I manage if I hold in my stomach, don’t eat much and go to bed early to keep warm.’
‘Yeah, eight o’clock.’
‘Twenty-five past, more like. I eat, watch a soap, do my dishes and then bed.’
Marla nodded. ‘Do people read poetry magazines?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it just poems in them?’
‘We published lists of poetry events, readings and so on, and also profiles of poets as well as poems.’
‘But you didn’t write poems?’
‘Yes. I did once.’
‘You actually wrote poems? You had a bit of blank paper and wrote a poem on it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
This was a terrifying question. Anna shrank from it. ‘I love words. They thrill me.’
‘You could just speak. No need to be writing things down. I couldn’t be doing with it. I’d have to sit still.’
‘There’s that,’ said Anna. She gazed at Marla. The woman was small and frighteningly thin. The purple hair was shoulder length and gleamed. Anna wondered what she used. Marla’s face was pale, colourless. Her lips painted pale brown and her eyebrows two fine plucked lines. She had a selection of studs in her ears and a further blue one in her nostril. She wore a thin vest. Her default expression was cynical. Her boldness was impressive. Anna liked her, even if she was dismissive of poetry.
‘Did you get your poems published?’ Marla asked.
‘I published them myself.’
‘Why?’
Another difficult question.
‘Because I wanted to. I thought the world would enjoy them. I was wrong.’
‘What’s the point of all that? What’s the point of poems? What’s the point of you?’
Anna had no answer. She supposed she had just been asked the question she’d dreaded all her life. She opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out. She gazed past Marla and noticed a boy standing behind her. His hair was cropped. He wore jeans and T-shirt. He too was thin. On his feet green canvas boots decorated with duck pictures. Though she knew nothing of children and their likes and dislikes, she knew this boy was too old for his boots. Her heart went out to him.
‘What’s the point of me? That’s not a very nice question.’
Marla looked ashamed. ‘I suppose it wasn’t. I just wondered why you sat in a wee room and wrote when you could be out doing stuff.’
‘I was doing stuff. Writing.’ She turned, starting once more on her walk. Then she turned and confessed, ‘I didn’t go out. I stayed in my wee room. I felt safe. Tell me, what’s the point of you? What’s the point of anybody?’
Marla put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and manoeuvred him towards her front door. ‘We’re all numpties. We make cups of tea, have babies, eat heated-up pizza and complain about life. Nobody’s very good at being a person.’
‘That may be true,’ said Anna. ‘Now tell me why you’ve accosted me like this.’
‘I’m thinking you’re strapped for cash at the end of the week. You probably live on baked potatoes and beans. You could do with some money.’
‘Not always beans,’ Anna told her. ‘Tuna, cheese from time to time. I could do with some money. Who couldn’t?’
‘Nobody round here anyway. Everyone’s the same, worrying because there are more days in the week than there is money to see them through. Nobody’s middle class like you.’
Suddenly furious, Anna said, ‘Are you accusing me of being middle class?’ This was insulting. Didn’t the woman know poets were classless? They wrote the truth, that’s all.
‘Nah. You’re too messy.’ Marla shook her head and continued. ‘I’d like you to look after Marlon two or three times a week.’
‘Marlon?’
‘My boy.’ Marla turned and pointed to the child behind her. He winced at the sudden attention. ‘He’s no trouble. He’ll watch the television or draw things for a few hours. You just have to be there with him. I’ll be at work.’
Anna could hardly speak. Had her life come to this? She looked like she was so in need of money someone had asked her to look after a child. She didn’t like children. She was sure some of them were fine. But the very young were incontinent. They couldn’t help it, of course. But she had no idea how to deal with it. Changing a nappy was beyond her. Older children made odd noises, ran about at top speed with no idea of where they were going and said rude things loudly.
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I know nothing about children.’
In a quiet and sweet voice Marlon said, ‘Didn’t you used to be one?’
The directness of the question shook her. ‘I did. But I remember very little about the condition. It doesn’t qualify me for looking after one.’
Marla said, ‘You’ll learn. It’ll do you good. Get your mind off all that poetry. If you take him, I’ll want none of that. No poems.’
Angered, Anna leaned on her stick. ‘We have songs. We have dreams. We have poems. I think in the end it’s all we have.’ She realised she was shouting. After years and years in this street, coming and going, speaking to nobody, she was yelling an opinion. People came to windows to see what was going on. People stopped to stare. Anna squirmed. She was the centre of attention, stared at by neighbours who were not lovers of songs and dreams and poems. She was a fool.
6
Love in a Time of Tiramisu
George could never explain her love of food. It wasn’t as if she’d been starved as a child. Her plates had been almost overloaded. But the fare had been dull, repetitive and tasteless. Her mother considered cooking a chore. She had a food rota that saved her from planning menus. Monday was second-day roast beef, Tuesday stew, Wednesday second-day stew, Thursday fish, Friday was lamb chops and Sunday was first-day roast beef. Saturday, then, was George’s favourite day of the week. Her mother would serve something quick. A ready meal, usually Vesta Beef Curry or beans on toast. Her friends at school loved Saturdays because they were a day away from school and homework; George loved them because of the sudden new flavours, and anything from a tin was exotic.
George supposed her mother thought of food as fuel. Taste didn’t come into it. Certainly they’d need a plate of hot stew to keep them going on the CND marches the family went on. ‘It was a surprise to me when I discovered how good food could be. Same with sex. When I was told the facts of life nobody mentioned how much fun it was.’ She was indignant.
Matthew said, ‘They didn’t want you to do it. Not before you were past seventy at least.’
‘When I was late teens I was obsessed with sex. I couldn’t understand why people were standing at bus queues or working in shops or just walking down the street when they could be at home, you know, doing it. Same with food, I was stunned it was so good. Alistair would put a plate in front of me and I couldn’t believe it. I should
have named my children after food. Why not? These days parents seem to just pluck a word out of the ether and that’s what they call their baby – apple, pick-up truck, shoe. I should have called mine Vichyssoise, Bouillabaisse and Gazpacho.’
‘Pea and Ham, Tomato and Cream of Chicken,’ Matthew said. He grinned.
‘Ha ha. I should’ve called Lola Peperonata. It would have suited her. James could have been Ratatouille. Emma is a Gnocchi. Down to earth, but definitely not ordinary.’
‘No mention of Willy?’
She shook her head.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know that in my head. My heart isn’t convinced.’
*
Willy was a late child, a surprise for George. She’d thought she was past conceiving. ‘No, it isn’t the menopause. You haven’t got indigestion. You’re pregnant,’ her doctor told her.
‘How come?’
‘I think you know how come.’
‘I’m on the pill.’
‘Have you been ill? Diarrhoea?’
She stared at him, remembering. It had been sweaty and vile. The day after the night before, oh God. A woman, a nurse, a mother should not suffer so shamefully. She’d drunk too much wine and eaten a very dubious prawn curry. She should have known better. Twelve hours thundering back and forth to the lavatory had been punishment enough, surely? But no, now there was this. A fourth baby on the way.
She was thirty-eight at the time, married to Frank and couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She knew he wouldn’t be happy with the news. He’d often told her he was done with children. ‘I love them,’ he’d said. ‘But three is more than enough. It’s all new shoes and fights and rubbish programmes on TV and worrying and notes from school and . . .’ She hadn’t allowed him to finish. She knew well what he meant. James had asked recently for a toy she’d never heard of. She’d stared at him. She was too busy with fish fingers and homework she didn’t understand and shopping and her working life to keep up with what was happening. She felt alone in the world.
Frank was a big man with a big voice. A businessman busy buying and selling property, making a lot of money, he was away from home a lot. He could work a room. A man always in a bespoke suit living a bespoke life, George was familiar with the sight of him running a comb through his hair. She thought this a teenage thing to do. Recently it seemed to her they had lost the knack of speaking. And, as she’d said to Anna when they were having lunch in a busy city centre café, it had been a lovely courtship.
‘Nights out, restaurants, cinema and weekends in posh hotels. He’d take me dancing. I couldn’t believe it. That’s what film stars do. You know, sit at a beautiful table, chat wittily, sip Champagne and twirl round the floor from time to time. He called me his heroine. I suppose I thought we’d just keep dancing. He proposed at midnight on New Year’s Eve as we lay on a sheepskin rug in front of a log fire in a Highland lodge he’d rented. Lola was with my mother as I played at being Jeanne Moreau.’ She sighed. Her memories made her wince. ‘He thought we should make love and come together at the stroke of midnight.’
‘I love it. What a good plan. A New Year thrill,’ Anna said. George had noticed that while the clamour and noise of the café continued, there was a certain sudden silence at the tables nearby after her last remark.
‘Very hard to do,’ she’d continued. ‘You either come too early or too late. You are guaranteed to miss the vital bong on the clock. My sex skills had nothing to do with accurate timing.’
‘No, it isn’t what you’re thinking about.’
The couple at the table next to them exchanged a long look.
‘Anyway, he proposed. I accepted. He was wearing floral underpants. I wasn’t wearing anything. He didn’t even have a ring. But it was only really about his asking. The proposal was all. Marriage didn’t occur to him.’
‘Oh well, that’s romance. All frills and no reality.’
‘He wasn’t a chef,’ said George. ‘I love chefs. They understand the mixing of things. They know how to simmer.’
‘Simmering is good. I ended up just wanting a man who wasn’t gay. But if he could simmer too, that would be a benefit,’ said Anna.
The couple next to them had turned to stare. The man especially. He obviously had no idea what they were talking about. Anna had said she admired George. How much she knew life’s messiness intimately. She’d seen it all – sex, blood, birth and death – in hospital wards, operating theatres and treatment rooms. Anna said, not for the first time, that George ought to have been a poet. She had a lot more to be poetic about.
George ordered Earl Grey tea and a simple tomato sandwich. Anna, chin propped on cupped hand, elbow propped on table, had looked at the food in front of her foodie friend and said, ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
George nodded.
Anna said, ‘And you haven’t told Frank.’
George nodded. ‘I don’t know how. The right words escape me.’
But Frank noticed the change in George. She wasn’t drinking. She was moody. She was putting on weight.
‘You expecting?’ he said.
George said, ‘Yes.’
‘Is it mine?’
She hit him then. She’d never hit anyone before and was surprised at how long her hand hurt afterwards. He slept on the sofa downstairs that night. In the morning he’d come to her and apologised. He held her face in his hands. ‘I’m sorry. That was so wrong. Sorry. Sorry.’ He kissed her. But there was something in the air between them, a heaviness, a certain shiftiness. He wasn’t really looking at her. She knew then that her marriage hadn’t been what she thought it should have been. He’d been unfaithful on his long business trips. A string of one-night stands, she thought. But now it was obvious he’d assumed that she’d been unfaithful too. She hadn’t. She’d had the inclination on occasion, but never the time.
They sat on the bed taking in one another in a new light. As if they were seeing the person they were married to for the first time. Two emotional catastrophes in a perfect room, she thought. Their bedroom was white, everything white – bed, bed linen, wardrobe, dresser, carpet. It was a trial for the eyes when the sun poured in. It was also absurd, George thought. Toss a pair of red knickers to the laundry bag (white), and miss, and the knickers lay on the carpet in flamboyant insolence. They had no right to be there. Same for Frank’s floral underpants. Floral underpants – George could hardly believe it. Who wore floral underpants? Well, Frank did. It occurred to her that the perfect bedroom was a bit messy with a breeze whispering in through a slightly open window and a bed rumpled after a night’s love and sleep. A place where abandoned knickers looked happy on the floor. Here, in this hushed and stainless room, sat two messy beings considering their messy lives. It was wrong.
They had never bonded over the small stuff. Standing side by side in the supermarket deciding which soup to buy, or sitting on the sofa watching rubbish on television and being too tired to notice, far less change the station. Considering soup in the supermarket had been too trivial for Frank. The tiny intimacy of it would have scared him out of his floral underpants.
The marriage had lasted fourteen years. It had been wonderful from time to time – fabulous meals, expensive holidays and quite a bit of dancing. Oh, it had produced two beautiful babies. Mixed-emotion Ratatouille James and down-to-earth but never ordinary Gnocchi Emma were both a joy. They were balanced, sane, generous and loving. Probably not hers, then. She’d been handed the wrong babies. But she didn’t plan to hand them back and in return get the bad-tempered, howling, rude ones, her proper children, who’d taken after her.
Willy was no exception. After months of cursing and complaining, indigestion, placing her hand on the small of her back and exhaling discomfort George produced a beautiful baby. She wept. She told the nurse and the midwife that she didn’t know why. When asked what it was, she didn’t know. She said she didn’t know.
It had to do with love. She thought that at last she’d done something right.
She desperately loved the child. She needed him to love her back. She called him William. But he was Willy all his days.
He was a special child to George. She thought that here was a chance to get motherhood right. Her time with Willy would be about patience, understanding and love. A time of wonderment and chocolate cake. The cake was easy, wonderment not so much but she’d give it a go.
She worried that her other children would notice her obsession with the new child and be jealous. The other three didn’t need her in any physical motherly way any more, but still a sighting of favourite-child behaviour might stir resentment. George was surprised, then, when walking past the living room carrying the much-cherished baby she’d overheard James talking to his father.
‘What’s got into Mum?’ James said. ‘She’s obsessed with that baby. She doesn’t want to put him down. Is that what women are like?’
‘Some of them,’ said Frank. ‘But George was like that with all of you. I think she’s got too much love. It’s a burden for her. She was like that with all of you.’
‘She was?’
‘Don’t get me started on magic carpets and worlds behind wardrobes. She wanted you to be more than happy. She wanted to give you wonderment.’
‘I never really liked Winnie the Pooh,’ said James.
‘Never read it,’ said Frank. ‘Your ma did. She loves you. She loves you all. But you know what she’s like. She overdoes everything.’
George stopped to eavesdrop some more.
‘Does it always come from books, this wonderment thing?’ James asked.
‘Yes. Not films or anything else. She’d love it if you found a world behind your wardrobe and went there every night.’
‘That’d make me too knackered for football,’ James said.
George moved on up the hall, heading for the kitchen. Men, she thought. Too practical. Wonderment is wasted on them. But in that moment she understood why her parents had called her George. It had been a helping hand to wonderment. It hadn’t occurred to them that she might not be a tomboy. They thought she’d love being different.
She could imagine them sitting in their living room going through names. Rejecting everything because this child would be special and imaginative and very bright. George grinned. She’d been the same. She could almost see the delight on her parents’ faces when they’d decided on the name. How they must have clutched one another, filled with glee. They’d cracked it by calling their daughter after one of the heroes of Five on a Treasure Island. They’d given their girl the key to wonderment.