Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  But there should be significance in words. There should be words that are profound. There should be more than train times and the beep beep beep engaged-tone of a mother’s phone. There should be more.

  All so ordinary and so strange. Foxy eventually giving way to hunger and snacking, apologetically, on biscuits and cheese. Both of us drinking too much Metaxa. The sound of next door’s television through the wall, a commercial jingle, the sea-roar of laughter.

  3

  After seeing his face between the curtains peering at me in the tree-house, I met him. He was the new boy at school: Vassily Pudilchuck. He stood in front of the class, narrow shoulders hunched, a frightened smile on his yellow face, long teeth crossed at the front as if they were too tightly crammed in his mouth. His jumper was too big, rolled up at the wrists. Because he was deaf he had to sit at the front to make sure he could at least see. He had a funny smell, and big hearing-aids in each ear with wires going down his neck to a bulky rectangle under his sweater.

  ‘Because Vassily is hard of hearing’, Miss Bowen said, ‘you must make sure he can see your lips when you speak to him. And enunciate your words clearly’, she stretched her own lips as she said this to demonstrate, ‘so that Vassily can lip read. Perhaps Vassily would teach us all a bit of sign language?’ She looked at him but he had his head bent over the lid of his desk.

  ‘What’s sign language, Miss?’ said someone from the back.

  ‘It’s a system of hand signals,’ Miss Bowen explained, and there were sniggers as some boy did a V sign.

  My desk was behind Vassily’s. The knobbles of his spine showed right through his jumper and shirt as he leaned over his desk. The hearing-aids were pink and stuck out so that from behind he looked like some kind of robot with wires in its head. Later I was to learn that he hated the hearing-aids – that did little good anyway, but then they seemed an absurd, deliberately peculiar part of him. I didn’t recognise him, then, as the face that stared out of the window into our tree-house, down into our garden. But I disliked him in the fierce way children can dislike weaklings or misfits – with a sort of fear.

  By the end of his first day he had been christened Puddle-duck, a name that suited him because of the way he walked with his too-big feet splayed outwards and his head down. He was ten but he couldn’t read properly. Not hearing makes reading harder, Miss Bowen said, but still, he was ten. When he spoke it was very loud and sounded as if he had a bath sponge stuffed in his mouth soaking up the edges, the points and angles of his words. By the look of it, he never washed his hair. It looked solid like brownish clay and sat on his head like a dull corrugated lid. He made friends with a boy called Simon, or maybe not friends, but they stood together in the playground and shivered. Simon had eczema absolutely all over him and wore glasses with pink sticking plaster over one lens. He’d never had a friend before. But even Simon called Vassily Puddle-duck.

  I didn’t recognise him as the boy who spied on us from his upstairs window until, a few days later, something terrible happened. Something that jolted me into recognition.

  Puddle-duck hadn’t got a PE kit.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Miss Bowen, leaning towards him and enunciating, ‘just strip down to your underwear.’ It was a rainy day and we were doing indoor PE–throwing bean-bags, climbing ropes and apparatus, jumping over wooden horses on to spongy green mats. If we had no kit we were not let off but made to show off, to all the other boys and girls, our pants and vests. Fear of this humiliation ensured that we never forgot. Miss Bowen was wearing a short navy skirt and white ankle socks for the lesson. She jogged up and down on the spot waiting for Vassily. Her big red legs were haloed with white fuzz. He handed her his hearing-aids, great handfuls of pink plastic and curly wires that seemed horribly a part of him. Miss Bowen took the aids and stopped running.

  ‘Take off your jersey, Vassily,’ she said. He looked down at the floor. Miss Bowen put a hand under his chin to make him look up. ‘Take it off.’ She plucked at his sweater. His face went dark red. I thought he would refuse, but he took off the sweater. Everyone was ready now, gathered round him watching and that made it worse. Under his sweater he was wearing a crumpled and much-too-big shirt tucked into his shorts. ‘And this,’ said Miss Bowen, touching his shoulder. I think Miss Bowen was cruel, now I think that. Everyone was staring at Vassily. She should not have let us all stand and stare at him like that. He undid his shirt and took it off. He had no vest on and what we saw, we could hardly believe. Nobody said an audible word but there was a stunned murmur.

  ‘Griselda, perhaps you’d be kind enough to fetch Vassily an Aertex shirt from Lost Property,’ Miss Bowen said. I hurried off, important. I was picturing his chest as I went down the gloomy, dinner-smelling corridor and I can picture him now. A puny boy with a flaming face and six nipples on his skinny concave front. It looked like the belly of a dog. Among the odd plimsolls and the rain-hoods in the Lost Property box I found a shirt for Vassily and took it back to the hall. Miss Bowen was holding Vassily’s hand and peeping her whistle between her teeth as my oddly quiet classmates scrambled on the apparatus and queued for the ropes. I handed Puddle-duck the shirt and made myself smile. He smiled back, a grateful narrow smile that made me queasy. And that is when I recognised him as the spy.

  If nobody liked Puddle-duck very much before, that day confirmed it. Puddle-duck was scarcely even human.

  The brandy has given me a thirst. It’s hot in the bedroom with the door closed. The window is open but muffled behind thick curtains. So the air in the room is still. The room is filled with breath. Foxy’s breath is slow and even and rises up the walls until I fear I will drown in it. My own breathing is fast. I should relax. Breathe deep, breathe slow. But all I am inhaling is old breath. It is stale air. The room is full of dead air. Now I am starting to panic. Stop that. Stop. Breathe. The air is fine. The window is open. You cannot drown in Foxy’s breath. You will not drown. Lie still. Oh my heart.

  Like the nights of Daddy’s dreams. Having to be still, hearing that scream but having to be still for Hazel. Having not to speak of it at all.

  Breakfast after those nights was awful. My father would sit with his hands clasped round his cup of tea as if he thought someone might snatch it. His chin would be rough and his curly hair wild. There would be a greasy sheen on his glasses so you could not see his eyes. The breakfast room was sunny with windows on two sides, but however much sun streamed into the room on mornings after a dream, the room would contain a cloud, a chill. My mother would be the same as ever, serving up poached eggs or bacon or kippers, the sun bright on her blonde hair, but she would seem like an actor on those days, someone on the stage with rouge and spiky lashes while the rest of us were grey. But even she didn’t speak to Daddy, just topped up his cup with tea and kept a nervous eye on him as she chatted to us.

  I am angry with my father for dying. For choosing to die. How dare he? It is the most selfish thing. Dad! How dare you? Eh? I was going to know him. There are things I do not know, secrets. There are things I wanted to ask him. I wanted his story from him. I wanted to know what was in his nightmares, what was the fear behind the screams, the fear that threaded itself into my own sleep and into me.

  The nightmares were never spoken of. Until I talked to Foxy I didn’t think that strange. They were a part of my childhood, not normal perhaps, but not strange. No stranger than my mother’s food fads, or the time she made us go barefoot for weeks to strengthen our arches. No stranger, I suppose, than the things that happen behind the curtains and the doors of every house in every street in every town.

  But Foxy said ‘What? You never asked him what he dreamed about?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What about your mum? What did she say?’

  I tried to think. My father had been a prisoner of the Japanese for five years. He’d worked on the building of the Burma-Siam railway. I didn’t think that was a big dea
l. I had seen the film The Bridge on the River Kwai and vaguely associated it with Daddy. Strong men, sweat and stiff-upper-lips. Daddy as Alec Guinness. Did I know the nightmares were about that? No, I didn’t. Terrible things happened in the war, but the war was over. It was nothing to do with me. It was history. He was whole. My dad.

  A holiday: the beach, Llandudno, North Wales. I noticed hollows on my father’s legs, the fleshy calves, deep hollows big enough to cup an egg in. I put my finger in one of the hollows. I must have been very young. It was warm and smooth inside, purplish like the skin on a newborn mouse, not hairy like the rest of his legs. I wanted to ask him what the holes were but he jumped up and pelted down the beach, ran splashily through the shallows until he reached deep water and then he swam. He swam out and out like always, arm over arm over arm. I was afraid when he swam out like that, out towards the middle of the sea, towards nothing. His dark head grew smaller and smaller, sometimes vanishing altogether. When I could see him no longer and I thought he had drowned, I did not scream or shout or point, I turned over on to my tummy on the beach-towel, fear beating in my veins. I lay still on the beach-towel, eyes shut, the chill of the sand striking up through the towel, shutting out the voices of Mummy and Hazel who were oblivious to the danger, until I felt the sprinkle of cold that meant that he was back. I turned over and looked up at him, towering against the sun above me, all the hairs on his body cradling glittering drops. I got up off the towel to let him use it. I didn’t say a thing but I was so relieved that he was safe I needed to pee. I walked down the beach and into the sea until the cold water gripped me by the waist and then I peed blushing as the invisible heat flowed out between my legs into the cold.

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t ask your mum about his dreams,’ Foxy frowning at me, an edge of criticism in her tone.

  I shrugged. Close as you are to someone, up to your eyes in love, it doesn’t mean that they will understand you. No one from outside can really understand a family: it is a culture it takes a lifetime to acquire.

  ‘If that was part of my family history, I’d have to know,’ she insisted. Foxy is a historian, her special interest oral history, family histories, the quiet stuff, the detail. She still teaches a little but most of her time and energy are concentrated on writing and research. Her study is piled with boxes of tapes, faint crackly voices recounting memories from the beginning of the century, Victorian and Edwardian voices. She gets quite frantic sometimes when she thinks of the dying resource, the most direct primary evidence. But skewed, I say, for how can a memory not be skewed that is eighty or ninety years old, that has either lain dormant or been continually embroidered for the best part of a century? It’s Foxy’s turn to shrug at this and talk about intelligent and selective interpretation, about empirical corroboration. I criticise, but I think it’s wonderful, what she does. I think she is wonderful, asleep now, awash in the tangle of her hair.

  She is so much cleverer than me. Cleverer and more patient. My degree – not a bad one, 2:1 in history and philosophy – has fallen off me like so much dust, all that learning. I prefer the day-to-dayness of my business, selling second-hand and period clothes. Second Hand Rose is the name of my shop, a popular shop in the centre of York. I spend much of the week travelling to markets and auctions collecting stock. I wash and press and mend while listening to the radio most evenings, turned down low so as not to disturb Foxy when she’s working at home. I open my shop five days from midday to six. Connie works in the shop and lives in the upstairs flat. My guard-dog she calls herself, giving a big husky bark of laughter. I can’t pay her much but she has the flat rent free, a pokey hole, admittedly, and the odd outfit. And I mean odd. When I’m buying I keep Connie in mind. She’s in her mid-fifties. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb, I know me duck,’ she says cheerfully, though I wouldn’t say lamb exactly. She likes spiked heels and patent leather mini-skirts, tight neon-coloured satin blouses. She wears her hair in an orange beehive and her legs are sensational. She has a stream of lovers, thirty years her junior at least, whom she treats kindly – ‘I give them the time of their life, darling’ – and then in the nicest possible way discards before they become attached. Her voice is a deep sexy purr and we fight constantly but amicably over the Gauloise she will smoke from a long tortoise-shell holder so that the clothes, when you shake them out, all have a faint reek of France.

  My working life is markets and motorways, the shop and Connie and clothes. Image. It is all surface, unlike Foxy’s working life which is earnest and burrows beneath the surface. But clothes are important, they are part of it, Foxy says so herself. She likes to get her subjects to talk about their clothes, the fashions, the costs, the difficulties, it is a rich seam to mine, she says. Oh Foxy. She is glamorous – even naked. The clothes she wears are severe, her spectacles too, stern ovals, but her chestnut hair, that is long and slippery. She wears it in a French pleat that will not stay properly in. She is often to be seen, both hands behind her head, her mouth full of hair-grips, recapturing it. She wears too much lipstick and it never quite matches the shape of her lips. It is always bright – vermilion or cherry or scarlet – and always too big, slipping over the edges of her mouth. It is her only design fault and I love it. All our cups and glasses have red grease-marks on the rims, because unless you scrub, it will not come off. Still, I don’t mind, I like to drink from the very place where her lips have been. God, I am besotted! No wonder she wants … no! She has not said she wants to go and she is sleeping so sweetly beside me, how could she sleep so sweetly if she was not happy? If she did not want me beside her?

  4

  My mother has met Foxy, although I did not introduce her as Foxy. That name too pungent and feral to be taken into my family. My friend, I called her, my friend Sybil. It makes me laugh that she is really called that, Sybil – prophetess, fortune-teller, witch. She is none of those things – except in her capacity to bewitch me. She is the most rational and pragmatic of beings. Sybil Fox. It is only me who calls her Foxy, to most of her other friends she is Syb, quite inappropriate: a numb little snippy snub of a name. And she calls me Zelda. She has made me Zelda, a desirable grown-up woman when before I was a child, Griselda, known to my family, and even a lover or two, as Grizzle.

  I have never told my mother, in so many words, that Foxy, Sybil, is my lover, but I know she knows. She is not shocked. She has an open, Scandinavian, streak in her. She has visited me, us, three times in this flat. Christmas shopping in York has become a new ritual. We wander round the shops until our feet are aching and then have lunch followed by tea and wicked cakes in Betty’s, her treat. It is the most mother-and-daughterish thing we do.

  She has seen the bedroom with the double bed, the double wardrobe, the two pairs of slippers on the floor. Foxy’s study has a single bed where she sometimes snoozes in the afternoons among her papers so Mummy might think she sleeps there, if she wants to think that then she can. But I know she knows we are a couple because last year her Christmas card to us read: To Griselda and Sybil with love from Mum and Dad as if we are a married couple.

  Mum and Dad. That is the last time and I did not treasure it. This year the card will read only love Mum to her family, love Astrid to everyone else. How will she do it after forty-two years? How will she stop her hand writing and Dad or and Ralph?

  I wish I had got through to her tonight. Why was her phone engaged so long? Who was she talking to? She should have been talking to me or Huw or Hazel. I could get up. I could get up quietly and phone her now. At this time? On a night like this?

  My father is dead. This is the only day that he will die on. September 9th. No. It is past midnight, the 10th. Yesterday he died. Already it is yesterday, the past. September 9th. Last September 9th he didn’t know he only had a year to go. You have a deathday just like you have a birthday, the only difference is you do not know it. It is a secret like so much else.

  Daddy never knew about Foxy and me, of course he didn’t. I never said to Mum, don’t tell him. I couldn’t, sin
ce it was only tacitly known by her. But as well as that it is implicit in our family code that we don’t tell Daddy things he wouldn’t like. Didn’t tell. Soon the past tense will catch up with him, but, despite midnight, today is still his deathday, he can still be present tense today.

  ‘What did he tell you about his war?’ I asked my mother once, egged on by Foxy. Until I knew Foxy I had never noticed my mother’s reluctance to talk or think about my father’s past.

  She moved her hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Hardly a thing. He used to try and talk but … oh, I really don’t remember. Best not to dredge up the bad memories, best to bury them. Look forward not back. That’s what Ralph does. You should respect that, respect his privacy.’

  I repeated that to Foxy.

  She choked on her coffee. ‘Respect his privacy!’

  ‘Yes.’

  She wrinkled her nose so that her spectacles rose up indignantly. ‘It’s like letting gold flow down a drain,’ she said. ‘It is treasure, Zelda, it is part of you.’

  I wonder if Foxy would feel differently if she knew who she was? She was adopted at the age of six weeks. She tried once to discover the identities of her natural parents, she found only that it was a private adoption; her mother a young girl, her father an American GI. That’s all she knows. Her adoptive mother told her on her sixteenth birthday. I thought that must have been traumatic but, ‘No,’ she said emphatically, ‘not in the least. I liked to know that. I always felt I didn’t belong.’ I didn’t say that nor did I. I didn’t feel I belonged to my family either. I am short and solid and dark haired while Mummy and Hazel are tall and slim and blonde. If someone had told me I was adopted I would have been delighted, excited to shed part of my identity.

  Even now?

  A fantasy: my mother rings me up. She confesses that Daddy wasn’t my real, my biological, father, that she had an affair with someone – oh, Paul Newman, say. That used to be my fantasy. How would it make me feel? I don’t know. I am so tired. And anyway it’s stupid because although I haven’t inherited my mother’s Scandinavian looks, I am like Daddy.