Copycat

by Gillian White

  ‘She’s not just a neighbour, she’s a friend,’ I told him wearily. But Sam, like most men, doesn’t understand about friendships. ‘Don’t be so petty. She is bowed down by routine and a warped sense of duty.’

  Incoherent dark mumblings and then Sam said, ‘One holiday won’t change that. She’ll drag all her chains along with her. She needs them, Martha, can’t you see that? She uses pathos as a weapon and wins hands down every time. She needs those shackles for safety.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ I enquired coldly. He was such a selfish, uncaring bastard. ‘Men. Men who undermine a woman’s self-confidence so she builds these pitiful walls…’

  ‘Balls balls balls. You’re talking about Graham Gordon, remember? He’s more of a bloody woman than she is.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it. Jennie hasn’t had much of a life.’ I tried to explain matter-of-factly; Sam despised sentiment. I pushed him away from the sink. He always managed to look wrong there – just one of his more irritating knacks. I might as well do the apples myself. ‘She hasn’t had much fun or freedom. She grew up with a neurotic mother who carried a hideous grudge against a father who sodded off and left them. Try to imagine it.’ But I knew Sam couldn’t. Men with narrow vision, like him, don’t have vivid imaginations. ‘Jennie was the only child and had to grow up quickly and that’s why she’s so serious and that’s why you don’t like her. Isn’t it?’

  Oh, how Jennie suffered during those toddler years.

  And sometimes when she confided in me, I had the urge to shout ‘Shut up, stop, don’t tell me that, it’s too private.’ Instead I squirmed and my toes curled up. She trusted me implicitly, far more than I trusted myself.

  Did she think of me as a healer, able to make her whole again?

  ‘I’ve never told anyone this before…’ Starting another confession, she would look trustingly up at me with those large pale eyes. I think she thought I ought to feel flattered, but I wasn’t and it was hard to respond. I now know that a shrink would have helped her, a long and profound course of therapy. There were personal issues that needed sorting, present problems and past ones.

  And why had she shacked up with Graham?

  Their sex life verged on the non-existent.

  They made love once a week, on a Friday, to pacify him, I suppose. So on a Friday I’d think about them plodding upstairs in that awful cold way, knowing they had to do it whether they wanted to or not, and I imagined him in blue-striped pyjamas and Jennie in rosebud winceyette. I knew they didn’t dress that way, of course: he wore an M&S nightshirt and she white broderie anglaise nighties; rather charming as nighties go. I had sat on their bed often enough in that apathetic bedroom of theirs. I had seen the neatly folded garments on the individual pillows, not a crease in either of them, while I bottle-fed Scarlett to keep Jennie company.

  Sex and flesh.

  Bodies disgusted Jennie.

  I wished I’d not pushed that third sherry on the day she chose to unburden herself of her sexual problems. She didn’t drink much, ever, nor did she trawl the dark side of her nature. With her face set and her shoulders tensed, she picked at the wooden swirls on my table as she described her mother’s reaction when she found poor Jennie touching herself. And this was followed by the bowel movement saga. How important it was, in her mother’s house, to perform at a regular time every day and how she was smacked if she failed the inspection. So much was disgusting, so much was called rude. I listened to Jennie’s halting account with mounting disbelief and pity. Her embarrassment and shame were awful to see, so why was she telling me?

  I laughed it all off. Was this the wisest reaction?

  But she carried on as if in confession; such sad little sins had been eating her up. And I thought that I was helping her by absolving her of all blame. I know now that she didn’t want that – she liked to endure, she enjoyed her guilt. A whip to scourge her back would have given her more relief than forgiveness.

  ‘So what would you do, Martha, if you found Scarlett with a vibrator?’

  ‘Well, if she wasn’t just two years old, then I hope I’d respect her privacy and be happy that she could enjoy such pleasure. Your mother was obviously a woman with problems.’ I got up to turn down my boiling beetroot.

  ‘She did have problems. A hard life. She worked herself to the bone.’

  To the bone? What an odd thing to say in the late twentieth century. That mother/daughter relationship sounded vaguely abnormal to me.

  ‘I don’t feel a thing with Graham,’ she said in a small stiff voice. ‘It could be a finger up my nose.’

  ‘So perhaps it’s time you had a fling, a bonk with somebody else.’ I was joking.

  ‘Oh Martha,’ she said coyly. ‘Trust you.’

  ‘Did you never feel anything?’ I asked out of interest. ‘Not even at the beginning? Not even with anyone else?’

  Then she blushed virtuously and I thought she was like a nun, spiritual, she hardly existed in the flesh. ‘There was nobody else before him, and I could never cheat on him. I love him. I might not like him in bed with me, but I really do love him a lot.’

  Graham was a white-meat eater, he was suspicious of red and that’s probably why he fell for Jennie. The largest part of him was his face, round and ponderous; below that he was thin, almost gaunt. Despite that, I felt he’d be heavy in bed. He had old-RAF-film dusty red hair, decent and boyish in the mess alongside David Niven. Graham was quiet with a quick, dry wit, coming out with the odd one-liner that made even the cynical Sam weak with laughter. I suspected he was afraid of me and considered me far too vulgar.

  So could it be this serious, considerate man who put the squeeze on Jennie, so she felt she should clean, bake and scrub, remove her shoes at the door, wash her baby’s hair every day and vacuum the inside of the car on a Saturday? And regularly vote Conservative – the natural response to inferiority?

  Or was it the dire magazines she used to digest so avidly?

  Whatever it was, I suspected that Graham disapproved of my friendship with his wife. You could see how disconcerted he felt when she and I shared some secret joke. But although I was a bad influence, he must have recognized that his duty-bound wife had to be able to let go sometimes, had to escape that antiseptic house, or go stark staring mad.

  That holiday was a solemn affair.

  Lists lists lists. Trips to Mothercare, the surgery, the chemist, the bookshop for advice about travelling with baby because the world across the Channel was a dangerous place where the heathen hordes lay waiting.

  What I considered went quite well, Sam called an unmitigated disaster. OK, the flight was a nightmare due to Jennie’s concerns over Poppy. With a mother so tense and tortured, of course her baby screamed.

  She complained to the stewardess about a loose screw, pointing it out, on the wing.

  Southern Italy was far too hot, dirty and cruel to animals.

  Nothing but veal and more veal, and she wasn’t about to feed veal to her toddler. Poppy was allergic to sunshine, so out came the calamine bottle again. The pushchair fringe wouldn’t fix properly. Sam, me, Emma and Mark went off for days in the hills leaving Graham and Jennie imprisoned in the hotel. ‘At least the room is cool,’ she said, ‘and we can boil the water.’

  Emma and Mark, old friends of ours, had shared our holidays before. ‘You must have known it was going to be hot,’ Emma told Jennie quite fairly. ‘So what made you come in the first place?’

  ‘There’s heat and heat,’ said Jennie, flapping an overlarge sunhat. She’d resented Emma immediately in spite of the fact that, as mothers, she and I had more in common than my old soul-mate and college buddy. ‘This is a nasty dry heat which sticks in your throat, it can’t be healthy.’

  We ate out, drank wine, enjoyed most of our meals under vines.

  But the bugs, dark and purple as the local plonk, bit the babies and Poppy cried.

  The Germolene came out of the bag.

  The rash spread.

  Th
e sea stank of sewage. ‘That’s not shit, that’s seaweed,’ said Sam, floating belly up on the water with a giggling Scarlett, brown as a berry in spite of the warnings, balanced precariously on his chest. But Graham knew best; after all, he did work for Essex Water.

  Vegetables were plentiful but even so Graham, nearly a veggie but not quite decisive enough, found it hard to choose from the menu. There were times when we waited twenty minutes while he made his impossible choice. Sam knew exactly how long because he secretly timed it.

  ‘Never no more,’ he said, eyes rolling, in the privacy of our bedroom. ‘And I blame you.’

  I threw him a towel. ‘Don’t be so negative.’ Tanned all over except for his bum, he knew he looked good and was showing off. ‘It’s not affecting your holiday,’ I said, ‘only theirs, which is a shame. I’m feeling guilty now. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked them?’

  ‘You, my sweetheart, are a manipulative, interfering old tart.’ He put his hand over my mouth to stop me being boring, covered me with sand from his hairy chest, and we made love. Again.

  So bearing in mind my tolerance and goodwill, eight years later when the bullying story came out, you can understand why I couldn’t believe it when Mrs Forest rang to talk to me about Scarlett.

  The situation was getting out of hand.

  Why had Jennie complained to the school with me just across the fence? What the hell had got into her?

  I’d been gobsmacked by the confrontation after she’d found Poppy alone in the mall and by her crude interpretation of that troubled little threesome, especially when I’d gone to such lengths to make damn sure they included Poppy the time Harriet Birch came to stay.

  I could hardly stop Scarlett from having friends, and threesomes rarely work; even with adults they can be tricky. Little girls can be bitchy, but I’m not always first to spot the clues, unlike gloomy Jennie, forever on the lookout for Satan’s cowpats to splat down on her innocent head. Sam calls it invoking the devil. I’d rather wait till the worst happens before I start clearing up the mess.

  But there had been clues. I should have noticed the surface friction. I remember Scarlett called Poppy mean, and there were other pointers, but nothing firm or consistent enough for me to take too seriously. She’d said, ‘Poppy’s mean but you won’t see it. She sneaks behind our backs. And she told me that Graham called you a slut.’

  This is the kind of kids’ conversation I switch off when it starts. I think I just said, ‘He calls me a slut because Jennie’s so neat, she works so hard. And the same applies to you, young ladies. Look at you, Scarlett, look at Harriet! When’s the last time your hair saw a brush? Your hands are encrusted with grime. You’re revolting.’

  I was busy and life was hectic.

  Sam delighted in telling me that he thought I was overdoing it, working on the Express full time, starting again when I got home, and later on having to deal with Lawrence’s croup.

  And then, was it the following week or the one before?

  ‘Poppy’s always hanging around. She won’t leave us alone, will she, Harry? She won’t take the hint. Why does she always mope around here?’

  ‘Scarlett, you sound so horrid,’ I said. ‘Poppy is still your friend and just because you’ve found somebody new, that doesn’t mean you can dump the old one. No. It won’t do. You and Harry must try to make sure you don’t exclude poor little Poppy. Be kind, please. Show her you care.’

  ‘But why doesn’t Poppy have other friends?’

  My first glass of wine, downed too quickly, must have dimmed my brain; there was no sharpness left. I liked to be well into my second before I started cooking the meal. ‘Poppy is shy and you know that.’

  I scarcely noticed how Harriet kept her hands clasped in front and her small eyes fastened on Scarlett, but the half-smile on her face announced her enjoyment of this little scene. I wasn’t sure I approved of Harriet. ‘Poppy’s not shy, she’s sly, like Princess Diana.’

  I had a thousand things to do and the kids were pestering, in the way. And where was Lawrence? I’d called him in ages ago. My eight-year-old son was turning native. I hardly ever saw him until he started coughing his lungs up at night. We lived our lives in the kitchen, not in specially designated areas like they did next door, and at times like this when I needed to cook I regretted our slovenly lifestyle.

  ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead. You’ve been listening to your father.’

  ‘Poppy told Mrs Forest she saw me and Harry take some money from Kirsty Sullivan’s gym bag.’

  Hey. What was this?

  ‘Poppy told Mrs Forest. And when Mrs Forest looked in my gym bag Kirsty’s fifty pence was in there, exactly where Poppy said.’

  This was more serious. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘On Monday, but it’s OK because Mrs Forest believed me and Harry.’

  ‘But why the hell would Poppy say that?’

  ‘And,’ said Scarlett, a knowing sparkle in her eye, ‘Poppy said that Jennie had it off with Daddy at a party.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, and Harriet Birch gave an unpleasant snigger. ‘This is ridiculous. Poppy’s imagination running riot. Go somewhere else with your scurrilous gossip and for God’s sake wash your hands.’

  Sometimes I wished that she was dead.

  FIVE

  Jennie

  SOMETIMES I WISHED THAT she was dead.

  When we went to Italy Martha was pregnant; by the time we got home so was I. A triumph when you think of the sweaty sheets, the failing fan and the weak sexual charge that Martha said existed between me and Graham. Italy was the first time Graham and I went away together, apart from those months with his mum and the odd weekend with my mum, Stella, below ground in her Walthamstow basement.

  Hardly holidays.

  We managed to rescue a broken-down donkey from a scar-faced peasant with teeth like dominoes. In tears I turned from the plight of the dogs, the dying hens…

  Everybody accepts the fact that the sort of stress you have with your baby, especially your first, is bound to affect you as they grow. I had stress all the time when poor little Poppy was born. Martha did not. Martha and Sam did not have to suffer the tensions of wearying visitors. Their families’ homes, being bigger and grander, offered nothing but happy respite, and when Martha went to her mother in Dorset, she came home refreshed and rested.

  Stella, my mother – in her late forties, so a long way from elderly – was turning the colour of bone and her hair was mouse brown and tightly permed. She moved in for a fortnight after Poppy was born and, quite apart from the traumas she caused, she interrupted my new friendship with Martha. I hate to admit this, but for the first time in my life I felt desperately ashamed of her and the values she represented, of her hostile attitudes and her mean-sounding voice, of her cleanliness fetish and her love of hard work.

  ‘I come all the way here,’ she said, ‘and all you want to do is gad off next door to gossip with that dreadful woman.’

  ‘She’s good fun.’

  Stella’s blancmanges with skin on top lay heavily on my still-swollen tummy.

  Poor Mum. Born to be useful and neutered by life, she would rather I was tucked up in bed, an invalid dependent on her, clinical and kept sterile. And I loathed the way she fawned and simpered when the midwife called, still deferential towards anyone medical.

  And the fuss she made before the midwife’s visits.

  Shipshape and sweet-smelling – not just me but the whole house – me sitting in a chair, daisy-fresh, not a suggestion of torn flesh about me and Poppy already up and bathed, a frilly doll in her lacy cradle. The washing got dried out on the line, free of all by-products of the body, the sink was clear, my home clean and hoovered.

  Sluggish and mournful in the middle of this, like a sloth in a roomful of monkeys, I did my best to enlighten her. ‘She’s only a midwife, Mum. We don’t need to do all this. She’s not going to whisk Poppy away if the house doesn’t come up to scratch.’

  But she fought me every inch of th
e way. ‘That’s no attitude to take. You’re a mother now and you need a routine. We certainly don’t want people thinking…’

  I turned off. I refused to listen. This phrase, the scourge of my childhood – we don’t want people thinking – meant milk bottles sparkled on our step, I never left home without my bran flakes, I wrote thank-you letters by return, my hair was cut in a basin-shaped fringe and we never ate chips in the street.

  What was Stella so afraid of?

  But I had been indoctrinated at too early an age to recover, Martha told me.

  After a submissive farewell to the midwife, Stella would keep the door open to watch the nurse’s arrival at Martha’s. Knowing how much I admired her, Stella viewed Martha with derision and pity. She gloried in the fact that my neighbour’s door was frequently opened by ‘a slattern in a dirty nightie’, with Scarlett screaming in her arms. ‘What does she look like? How the heck did she find a husband? And that poor child, what a start in life…’

  But I noticed the midwife stayed longer at Martha’s. That was where she stopped for her morning coffee, although Stella had laid out a tray with a doily and three neat biscuits.

  Did Martha not notice, or did she not care about Stella’s blatant disapproval? Either way I was so relieved. I didn’t want to lose her as a friend.

  ‘Interesting,’ Stella observed, ‘Martha’s mother hasn’t taken the trouble.’

  ‘She did offer, actually, but Martha would rather not have her around.’

  ‘Huh, and I can imagine why.’

  ‘Mum, you don’t even know her.’

  ‘And you do, Jennie, do you? You met her at the hospital. And you don’t need to be on intimate terms to know what sort of person she is.’

  As far back as I could remember, Stella was judgemental, rather cruel, putting down other people who didn’t conform to her petty standards. I knew this was a kind of defence, a way of being superior, and God knows she had little enough to be superior about.