Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Having a night off,’ she said. ‘Do join us.’

  ‘Off what?’ I asked but she didn’t hear.

  I hadn’t meant to stay or even step inside. But it was very cosy in the room and Vassily had hardly even looked at me. He was engrossed in some Carry On film. Without the sound on, it was as if the characters were under water, a tank full of bright silly fish opening and closing their silent mouths to the rather odd music.

  ‘Bacardi and coke?’ Wanda waved the bottle at me. I was flattered. The only alcohol I’d had before was a thimbleful of ginger wine at Christmas. That was something I liked about Wanda – she didn’t treat me like a child. I was disappointed with the drink, it tasted just like ordinary coke. But still, coke was a treat in itself. Mummy wouldn’t buy it, but Wanda actually got it from the milkman on Saturdays along with her milk.

  ‘How’s your love life?’ she asked, curling up on the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her. The sofa made puffy, squelchy sounds as she snuggled her body down.

  I laughed. ‘How’s yours?’ I replied, very cheeky. Where her dressing-gown fell open I could see the skin on the inside of her knee, very white skin, a little rough. She made a funny face and I laughed again. I took another gulp of my drink. I was surprised at the way laughs kept fizzing up inside me like the Coca-Cola bubbles in my glass. She had a silver ring on every finger. She saw me looking and took one off. It was a puzzle ring. She undid it so that it was just a loose jumble of uneven loops and fidgeted it back together. She had quite thick fingers and chewed nails. ‘Can I have a go?’ I asked. She handed it to me and topped up our drinks. I looked over at Vassily who was still absorbed by the television, a full glass clasped between his hands. I hoped there was no Bacardi in his coke.

  ‘TV addict,’ Wanda said quite proudly, following my glance. ‘Though that’s a wonder he makes anything of it.’ She pulled the lobe of her ear. I could smell her patchouli oil and the clashing muskiness from the joss-stick. My teeth felt dry and tacky from the drink.

  ‘German measles,’ Wanda said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Got it when I was carrying …’ she nodded at Vassily.

  ‘Oh … and did that make him …?’ I fiddled with the ring, but I couldn’t make the pieces fit together.

  ‘Could have been worse, that sometimes make them blind and all.’ I tried to imagine being deaf and blind. There was a film about Helen Keller I’d seen on the television. I couldn’t think how, if you couldn’t see or hear, you could do anything. How you would even know that you were there. I took another swig of my drink. The idea made me dizzy.

  ‘Vassily gets on very well, considering,’ I said.

  ‘Well he’s doing speech therapy and that,’ she said. ‘Poor little spook.’ She sighed. I thought the name suited him – Spook – little spindly ghosty boy. ‘He’s no oil painting, is he?’ she continued. ‘But you should of seen his dad.’ She rolled her eyes and held her breath while I imagined a hero. ‘At least I assume that was his dad.’ She laughed again. ‘Your dad now he’s a …’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘He’s a nice dad. He’s nice to my Vass.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took the ring and showed me how to do the puzzle. ‘And your mum, she’s nice too. A nice family.’ There was something a little grudging in her tone. I could see the deep and downy crease between her breasts. I knew what the word sexy meant. I burped and blushed.

  She laughed. ‘Better out than in.’

  ‘I ought to go and do my homework.’

  ‘What a good girl.’ Wanda’s voice was wistful now. I finished my drink. The record ended, the arm of the record-player swept across and clicked. The room suddenly seemed very quiet.

  ‘Let’s have another go first.’ I took the ring back and shook it apart. This time I did it.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If that fits you.’ It was too loose even for my middle finger but I didn’t say. I wanted to keep it.

  ‘You’re quite pretty,’ Wanda said, pulling her head back and surveying me critically.

  ‘I’m not.

  ‘Give you a few years.’

  ‘It’s Hazel who’s pretty,’ I said, willing her to disagree.

  ‘Horses for courses,’ she said. ‘Got ten minutes?’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  ‘Come here then.’ She took me through into her bedroom. It was extremely untidy, the bed all rumpled and strewn with more magazines, clothes all over the floor, and soft toys. A black furry gorilla lolled on her pillows.

  ‘There’s a lot of toys in this house,’ I said. Standing up I felt most peculiar, very squat as if there wasn’t much space between my great big head and feet.

  ‘We like toys, me and Vass,’ she said. ‘We go up town Saturdays, shopping. That’s our treat. Look …’ She picked up a wind-up monkey, swept a litter of envelopes, tissues and lipsticks off her dressing-table, wound the key and set the toy down. It loped along for a few steps, then suddenly turned a somersault on its fists, landed back on its feet and walked right off the edge of the dressing-table on to the floor where it buzzed helplessly, its legs scissoring in the air. She shrieked with laughter and flopped on to the bed. ‘Int that a scream?’ I smiled and sat down beside her wondering what on earth it must be like to have such a childish mother.

  ‘Right then,’ she said. She narrowed her eyes at me and picked up a hairbrush and a comb. She crawled behind me on the bed and knelt so that I could see our two faces in the mirror. She lifted strands of my hair up and started to comb them backwards from the tips to the scalp. ‘Back-combing,’ she explained. My hair swelled as she worked through it into a voluminous brown fuzz. I spent many hours a week trying to calm my hair down into something as biddable as Hazel’s, ironing it, even sleeping in a Balaclava helmet, and here was Wanda trying to make it worse. Under the bare backs of my thighs I could feel crumbs on the nylon sheet. The green nightie was a bright puff on the floor. ‘There … what do you think?’

  I turned my head from side to side. ‘Not sure,’ I said.

  ‘You want to get a bit of henna on that,’ she said. ‘You’d look fantastic. Now eyes.’ She crawled off the bed and rummaged through a dressing-table drawer. ‘Kohl,’ she said. She sucked a little brush into a moist point and dabbed it on a block of black stuff. ‘Keep still.’ Her face was very close to mine. She had black marks from the brush on her lips. The rough tip of her tongue was nipped between her teeth as she painted tickly lines above my eyelashes and then on the lower rim of my eye. I felt the brush slip and slide on my eyeball. ‘Oops! All right?’ I nodded. My nostrils were full of the scent of her breath and her skin. ‘I’d of loved a girl,’ she sighed, as she finished. ‘Not that I don’t love Vass, of course. But I would’ve liked a daughter.’

  I felt almost jealous of the daughter she didn’t have.

  ‘There, what do you reckon?’

  My eyes looked smoky and mysterious. Like something out of a Turkish delight advertisement. ‘Fabulous,’ I said. Although I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Told you you were pretty, didn’t I?’ She looked proud. ‘Getting tits too.’ She touched my chest where small lumpy swellings were starting under my nipples. I jerked away from her hand. I hadn’t realised they showed. I was terrified of getting breasts at all, and particularly of getting them before Hazel who would never forgive me.

  ‘Better go,’ I said. My chest smarted from the sudden casual touch of her hand. I hurried home, clumsy and nauseous from the drink.

  ‘Good God,’ Hazel said when she saw me. She was weighing out butter and flour for tomorrow’s domestic science lesson.

  ‘Wanda did it,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’ I put my hand up to the warm fuzz of my hair. I could see my white face reflected in the dark glass of the kitchen window.

  She pulled a face.

  ‘And she gave me this,’ I said, twisting the ring round my finger. She pretended she was too busy watching the needle flicker
on the scales to look.

  Mummy came in. ‘Oh there you are. I was about to send out a search party.’

  I touched my hair again. ‘Like it?’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly different.’

  ‘It’s back-combed with kohl on my eyes.’

  ‘Coal?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Kohl.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s bedtime. Are you all right? You look a bit flushed.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. But when I went upstairs I was sick.

  Next morning Dog-belly was waiting for me outside. I had what I suppose was a hangover and was too dopey to dodge him. I didn’t want to walk with him. Just because I liked his mother didn’t mean I had to like him. His hair looked clean for once. He had had it cut and his hearing-aids seemed to stick out further than ever on either side of his narrow yellow face.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, careful and loud.

  ‘Hi.’ I went to walk past him.

  ‘Griselda!’ By some bad luck my mother had happened to step outside at that moment with the milk bottles. When she called I thought I must have forgotten something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Walk with Vassily, won’t you?’ There was a slight warning inflection in her voice.

  ‘OK.’ I walked along in silence. He said one or two things, even touched my arm in a friendly way to try and spell something to me, but I didn’t look. I felt as if a balloon was inside me wanting to burst, my dislike for him was so strong: dislike, resentment and I don’t know what else. I wished I need never see him again. Hazel’s words came back to me once more, her cool precise voice, the way she’d said it as if it was obvious what I had to do. Hurt him. OK. Hurt him. But how?

  13

  ‘Your bath’s ready.’ Foxy comes in, her glasses steamy. ‘Oh Zelda, you’ve let your coffee get cold now!’

  ‘Been dozing.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, but come on, up.’

  ‘Bossy cow.’

  She smiles, stretches out her hands and pulls me from the warmth.

  The bath is deep and almost too hot and she has poured some of my lime bath soak into it. I twist and pin up my hair and slide down into the water. Less than twelve hours ago I lay in this bath, ignorant, innocent, of my father’s death. The morning sun streams dazzlingly through the bathroom window, curdling in the steam. Foxy perches on the edge of the bath.

  ‘More coffee?’

  I shake my head. The water is tight, hot, comforting. Somehow I goose-pimple for a moment against the heat of it; minuscule bubbles, fine as dust, rising from the down on my arms and belly.

  ‘I’ve been looking though your father’s papers.’

  ‘Oh?’ I close my eyes.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  I don’t answer. Of course she would look at them. I left them on the kitchen table where she could not fail to see. And being Foxy, it would be impossible for her not to read them. So I can’t, I shouldn’t, mind. But still, I find that I do.

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Sure?’

  I smile up at her. ‘There’s not much you can make out, is there?’

  She considers. ‘Enough.’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  ‘Well…’ she touches my shoulder with her cool index finger. She looks incongruously smart, here in the bathroom, hair done, lipstick on. She’s taken off her fogged-up glasses. From this angle, below her, I can see the signs of age in her face. The skin is not so tight as it used to be, the pores lax. As she looks down there is a suggestion – just a suggestion – of looseness about her jaw-line and cheeks, a puckering on her throat.

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask.

  ‘I think … well obviously he suffered. I think he was a very sensitive, a very intelligent, very … beautiful man. I’m sorry now I never met him.’ I can tell from the considered and slightly artificial way she speaks that she has planned what to say.

  ‘But I never knew him. Not that him.’ I cannot keep the wail out of my voice. ‘If you had met him you wouldn’t have seen those things.’

  She purses her lips and shrugs. ‘Maybe.’ She pauses. ‘Or maybe familiarity breeds contempt?’

  ‘That’s not true, that’s not fair.’ I smash my hand down in the water and splash her immaculate blouse.

  ‘Oi!’ she moves away. ‘All right. Sorry.’

  The water laps against me, through the wet white skin of my left breast I can see the faint beat of my heart. ‘I could have known him better,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe, but Zel, it was up to him.’

  ‘I never asked him anything about … about his past. I never …’

  ‘But he was your father.’

  ‘… even looked at him properly, not for a long time, if ever, I never …’

  ‘He was the adult. He should have set the agenda.’

  ‘… even took him into account as a man, do you know what I mean? An individual, an individual with a separate …’

  ‘There’s no way you can blame …’

  ‘… identity, personality. Separate from being my father, I mean … and even that …’

  ‘Hey … Zelda … calm down.’

  I give up, smile weakly, and slide further into the water so that it tickles the lobes of my ears. I shut my eyes against Foxy’s concern. I can feel a laugh stuck in me like a bubble in a coiled-up hose-pipe, thinking of what she said. He should have set the agenda. That jargon. I can just imagine his face if I had said that to him. ‘Father, it’s up to you to set the agenda.’ No. I can’t imagine his face, I can’t picture it at all. And I will never see it again.

  ‘Sweet-pea?’ The laugh crawls silently through the coils. Sweet-pea. A legume. Hazel and I called each other Old Bean. Another legume. Pulse. Nothing but a slight coincidence, not amusing. But coincidences are part of it. The texture of it. Of what? Life, experience. It. Coincidences, correspondences. Correspondences – letters, diaries. I correspond with you. Respond to me. Oh shut the hell up. I snap open my eyes.

  ‘All right?’ Her face is creased with concern.

  ‘Oh Foxy.’ I am exasperated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ How can I say, stop caring? I do want her to care but not like this. I don’t want her concern, her kindness, certainly not her pity. I want her genuine passion, not her compassion. Genuine passion or nothing at all. But I can’t say that because I do need her now.

  ‘I’ve put the papers back in the envelope. Maybe you should take them with you?’

  ‘Yes, no, maybe, I don’t know.’

  ‘Show them to your mother, Hazel, Huw?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Sit up,’ she says, leaning over to squeeze a sponge in the water. ‘I’ll do your back. Then we really must hit the road.’

  TICKLE

  1

  Screams in the sky, slits in the dark, streamers of shrieking light. A rocket plummets over the cliff edge and into the sea. In next door’s garden the bonfire has relaxed down to a glow of embers; the children with their excited shrieks and scribbling sparklers gone to bed – and the last remains of the paper-faced man turned to cinders or blown away in ashy flakes. I press my forehead against the cold window and my breath mists the glass.

  Mummy doesn’t know them very well, next door. If they had known today was the day of Daddy’s cremation, as Hazel indignantly pointed out, surely they would have had more tact than to burn their Guy just where we could see? But Mummy hadn’t told them. The funeral was kept very low key, family only. Because of the inquest, result: death by suicide, as if we didn’t know, as if we needed the stress of awaiting the verdict, the funeral was delayed for several weeks. Because Daddy took his own life, Mummy invited no one, wanted no party, wake, whatever you call it, wanted no funeral meats. I think that’s why. And now it’s over and done with and night has come, and as usual I am left awake. Mummy, Hazel, Colin and Huw all voted for an early night and left me to watch a late film and now, to drift about the house, to summon up the resolve to go to bed.

  The c
rematorium was lined with brown veneer. The flowers weren’t real, nor the arrangements inside, white blossoms of silk or polyester. Hazel clutched my hand as the coffin slid behind a Dralon drape and I had an urge to laugh, not that it was funny, but there seemed something absurd about the automatic swish of the curtain, the discreet swallowing of Daddy.

  While we were inside there was a hard fleeting shower which had splashed the real flowers, the wreaths and sprays of white roses and carnations, the chrysanthemum golf-bag from the golf club, with mud. Because Mummy had invited nobody, I was startled when we got outside, blinking in the wet sunshine, to see Wanda.

  ‘Have I missed it?’ she said. ‘Fucking taxi-driver … oh I am sorry.’ Her face went scarlet and I thought she would weep with embarrassment. She threw her arms round Mummy, who stood stiffly allowing herself to be embraced but giving nothing back. Colin shuffled his feet, waiting for an introduction. Hazel took his arm, ‘An old family, sort of, friend,’ she whispered.

  Wanda’s hair is black, newly black. I wonder if she dyed it for the occasion? And she was wearing a black brocade coat. She’s lost weight, I’m sure, and looked sallow – maybe black’s just not her colour. If it wasn’t for her earrings, a long silver cat dangling from one lobe, five graduated rings of silver in the other, she might have passed for conventional. She gave me a hug. ‘Hello stranger,’ she said into my ear. Her smell has changed: more musk than patchouli now.

  ‘Well, what a surprise.’ Mummy collected herself. ‘We’re not having a … a do,’ she said, ‘but if you’d like to come back for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Gasping for one.’

  ‘Come with us.’ Huw beckoned and led the way to his car. It was nearly an hour’s drive home. Mummy went with Hazel and Colin. The wet road glittered through the dusty windscreen and caused my eyes to water. I was upset, holding back my feelings, not just about Daddy but about Foxy too, gritting my teeth against them, forcing them down and out of the light of my consciousness. Because they … well they would wait.

  Dustbins were being emptied on the outskirts of town. It seemed a terribly ordinary day. We got stuck behind a tractor and trailer and had to crawl for miles. A yellow sycamore leaf drifted on to the windscreen, the sky was blandly blue.