The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  5. Digging for diamonds in the pavement on Pleasant Valley. In the heat of summer, they slip out as easily as a hard, ripe pea from the soft fur of its pod. So far we have mined three hundred and seventy-four, though that barely covers the bottom of our Golden Shred jar. When we’ve filled it, we’re going to sell them to the jewellers on King Street and use our fortune to buy a mansion in Kensington and attend the Royal Ballet (we are in a Noel Streatfeild phase). Tom says we’re being mad, that it’s just mica, no more precious than a chip of broken glass. Now I know him to be right, of course. But back then our dreams were achievable things. Because we had the folly of youth and all its endless promise on our side.

  It would be almost Disney-perfect if you and Mrs Trevelyan – Angela – were similarly inseparable; shared glasses of lemonade over the fence the way I see Tina Fraser’s and Melanie Best’s mums doing; went to Hair By Us to get matching perms and manicures, or just filter coffee and lemon gateau in the Corner Tearooms. But I see the way she looks at you; see you and me and our strange, messy house and strange, messy lives through her narrowed eyes. And I see that we are the Gollums to her perfect Galadriel, and so I take another step away from you, desperate to distinguish myself in Angela’s picture. While you are merrily oblivious, because you’ve never been desperate for a friend, have you? You’ve always had the luxury of assumption, because they’ve always been there, always done your bidding, danced in your wake, handed you what you asked for on a plate. Whereas people like me, we have to fight to find and keep our place. And fight I do.

  By the spring of 1978, my friendship with Harry had endured faultlessly for eighteen months and twenty-seven days, our only cross words a disagreement over who was better, Sindy or Pippa, and who had to have the green Opal Fruit and who got the red one. I lost both, or rather I backed down, calculatedly, given that neither the dolls nor the sweets in question belonged to me. But this time there has been no argument, no imagined slight, we have just slipped into silence and, on my part, feigned indifference. Because, while all the time I am playing patience and solitary hopscotch and one-hand-clapping games, Harry has been walking arm in tweed-coated arm with my replacement: Heidi Fulton-Hicks.

  This is not the last time this will happen. But the first cut, as they say, is the deepest, and this wound bleeds.

  Heidi is an affront to me on several grounds. Firstly, she has the name of my goat-herding heroine, the girl I – at least this month – would most like to be. Secondly, she doesn’t even know which wives Henry VIII beheaded and which ones he divorced, or how to do cat’s cradle, or more importantly, which china Whimsy animal is Harry’s favourite. But thirdly, and most injurious of all, she has clearly stolen this coveted position from me purely by dint of having two surnames.

  ‘But I could have two,’ I protest, dropping my satchel on the floor to indicate the level of my disappointment. ‘Why didn’t you keep Henderson?’

  ‘Because names are a . . . a marker,’ you say, gesturing wildly with your cigarette in your batwing dress so that the overall effect is of a smouldering curtain, ‘a siren. They stop you being who you want to be.’

  ‘But I want to be Dido Henderson-Jones,’ I protest.

  ‘Harry’ll come to her senses soon.’

  ‘But when? Heidi has a pony. And a Jacuzzi bath.’

  ‘And I expect the taps are gold and she shits glitter too.’

  I ignore this comment, though the prospect of shitting glitter is momentarily intriguing. ‘Why can’t we have a pony?’ I moan. ‘Or another pet, like a cat. Or a . . . a fish?’

  ‘Because I’m allergic. You know that.’

  ‘To fish?’

  ‘Fish give me the creeps. Dead eyes, Dido. It’s not right.’

  And so I am reduced to playing my only remaining card, the last resort of every wronged child. ‘But, Edie,’ I wail. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘Life’s not bloody fair,’ you say as you tap ash into the crockery-piled sink. ‘And if you think this is bad, wait until secondary. That, Di, is Lord of the bloody Flies.’

  But I am only seven years and seven months, and can imagine nothing as bad as this, not even with flies in it.

  And you, for once, can see my need. ‘Oh, Di.’ You drop your cigarette butt into the sink where it fizzes in congealing porridge. ‘Here.’ You hold out a wing and beckon me under it. ‘Just . . . don’t let it show,’ you say. ‘Pretend you don’t give two hoots and she’ll start giving at least one.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I sob.

  ‘Definitely maybe,’ you say.

  And so, my snot wiped off on your black satin, I shuffle upstairs to suffer nobly in silence, watching through the breath-misted window as the inseparable pair play Horse of the Year Show over milk crates and broom handles, on the course I designed. And I try, oh how I try, not to give a single hoot.

  But, while Harry may not have seen, still less admired, my steely stoicism, my dignity in defeat does not go unnoticed. Because Tom, now aged ten and thus above any of Heidi’s tricks and razzle-dazzle, appears to be affronted too.

  ‘She’s a cow,’ he says knowledgeably as we sit on his front wall chewing Tooty Minties. ‘She said I smelled of her grandma’s toilet.’

  ‘You don’t,’ I say, even though I have never smelt Heidi’s grandma, let alone her toilet, I know that he smells of Fairy washing powder and sometimes Mr Trevelyan’s Eau Sauvage that is kept on a doily on the mahogany dressing table. My loathing of her clicks up another notch.

  ‘Do you want to watch White Horses?’

  I shrug, which is itself an enormous effort given the size of the lie. I want to watch it more than anything. We don’t have a telly at the moment, not since you threw a mug of coffee at the portable and cracked the screen, and just the thought of the theme tune elicits a pale breathlessness at the prospect of escape and adventure; the way, later, cocaine will cast its spell before the powder is even out of his pocket.

  But for now my addiction is manageable, paling as it does beside my need to win Harry back. And my latest ploy, devised by you, is complete absence. ‘That way she’ll start missing you. You have to play hard to get,’ you advise. ‘Then they always come running.’ I don’t stop to wonder who you’ve tried this trick on and with how much success. I am just eager to test out anything that might return my small world to its status quo. And so, as Harry and Heidi return from the corner shop, giggling over their daring to eat Mivvis before May, I turn down my place on the Sanderson sofa, slip down from the wall, and march straight past without stopping.

  ‘Not staying for tea then?’ you ask as I stamp up the stairs.

  ‘No,’ I say, hands on hips on the very top tread. ‘And I shan’t until she bloody well changes her mind.’ And I flounce into my room and slam the door, glowing with the sudden realization that I have never, ever seen you more proud of me than you are right now.

  My resolve lasts two days into the Easter holidays, when the lure of Tom, and the bait of the television, grow too much to bear. And I clomp down the frost-crusted garden path and through the gate into a sparkling almost-Narnia, climb the fourteen rungs to the Wendy house, and wait.

  He comes. Of course he comes. It may have been Harry’s gift, her perfect version of her mother’s world in miniature, but it is Tom who has taken over the space, at least for now. In here, in his blue duffel coat and red bobble hat, amongst the woodlice and spiders and, once, a curious wren (for not even Mrs Trevelyan’s weekly Jif cloud can keep those at bay), he commands armies, ranks of green plastic privates and officers bought by the jar, fighting to the bitter end over a patch of mould-dusted Axminster; he explores underwater realms, his Jules Vernes stacked neatly on the shelf alongside a colander and a pepper pot; and twice he has put his hand under the waistband and snake belt of his corduroys and inside his pants, and delved into that unknown territory too, with me watching through the window, perched like a goggle-eyed pigeon on a branch outside.

  Today, though, I am inside, squatting next to the stove, on which
I am ‘boiling’ us breakfast: a can of Lilt emptied into the milk pan for porridge, and some Bourbon biscuits under the grill. In my imagination I am Susan in Swallows and Amazons, awaiting the return of the hero aboard his boat, or, better still, I am Mrs Herriot, from All Creatures Great and Small, another programme to which Harry and I have sworn our devotion. Or rather, we are sworn to its leading men; Harry to the impulsive and impossible Tristan, and I to the practical but still dashing James.

  ‘James,’ I say to myself, ‘you must be exhausted from having your arm up a cow all night – ’ an act I find unfathomable and unsavoury, yet somehow compelling – ‘sit down and have some breakfast.’

  And James kisses me on the nose, and insists there’s no time, because Mrs Pumphrey’s Pekinese Tricki Woo has a dicky tummy again.

  And at this I sigh, and place a hand on my heart as I watch him depart with his white coat and black bag, the very mark of a man, and give the porridge to the dog, again.

  ‘Why are you pouring pop onto a plate?’

  At the sound of his voice I drop the pan, sending a slop of fizzy pineapple and grapefruit across my wellies and seeping into the swirling shagpile.

  ‘It’s . . . it was a game,’ I say.

  ‘What game?’

  But I am too embarrassed to admit my imaginings, and so I pretend it was a taste test, to see if he could guess what it was.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  And to my bewilderment and delight, he lets me blindfold him with my green scarf, and feed him the Bourbons and the plate of pop, both of which he guesses first time. And then, back inside the full-sized and centrally heated kitchen at the Lodge, we take turns and try out lime marmalade, salad cream and sweet piccalilli, only the last of which I can name, for the others are as alien to me as avocados once were.

  ‘What are you two up to?’

  I pull up one of my pirate eyepatches, though I would recognize her voice across fathoms and light years. She’s wearing a dungaree dress and a striped polo neck, and on her arm is an identical Clothkits twin.

  ‘We’re taste-testing,’ I say. ‘Want to try?’

  ‘No thanks,’ says Heidi-the-twin, eyeing me, and clinging to Harry. ‘We’re going to the roller disco, aren’t we?’ And she tugs at Harry’s arm.

  Harry nods – why wouldn’t she? Even I would find it hard to turn down a trip to the rink in Mr Fulton-Hicks’s Mercedes-Benz. But as she turns to go, her eyes linger on me for a second too long. And I feel a thrill of victory as I realize I have fired my first arrow straight and true.

  And so I discover that all it takes – all it will ever take – to win Harry back is for me to take another lover. Because as Tom and I become the ones joined at the hip, as we huddle, tones hushed, heads touching over Lego, Meccano, his birthday Scalextric, the injustice of losing a friend and a brother becomes unbearable, and by the end of the week, with Heidi out of the picture on a package holiday to Portugal, I am back in my rightful place at Harry’s side, if always playing catch-up.

  Tom accepts this swapsies with markedly less complaint than when Colin O’Donnell persuaded him to exchange his brand-new boomerang for two broken Action Men. Instead, he smiles at me as I saunter in the back door, and saddles up his Chopper for solo adventures.

  But one thing has changed.

  Now, when we watch White Horses, it is I who gets the coveted middle seat, the pudge of my thighs pushed hard against Harry’s slender ones, but my head tilted, ever so slightly, towards Tom. And his towards me.

  It will last for a single week only, until school starts again, and our days are timetabled and our evenings scattered and taken up with chess club and swimming club and, in my case, book club (membership: one). But for those seven days, I am golden.

  And for a minute, now, I feel pity for you, and for all the bright stars, the leading ladies; that you will never get to glory in such a small but hard-won victory. And would I swap my place with you, or Harry? I used to think so, used to believe I would slip off my skin and slide into yours or hers in a heartbeat, in a New York minute. But today – when I see you here, corroded by life, prone and diminished against starched sheets, your skin yellowed tracing paper, your eyes holes in the snow; when I look at her in the waiting room, child-tired, wearing a life she swore she was never meant for, like a four-year-old playing dress-up in her mother’s furs – today the answer is no.

  A Christmas Carol

  December 1978

  I still have my stuffed monkey; the velveteen of his fur worn almost bare now and his once-bright glass eyes milky with scratches. He arrived in a jewelled waistcoat, though that disappeared within weeks, left in the garden or a park, or lost to the mound of chiffon and lace that had outgrown your wardrobe and begun to breed on the bedroom floor. But this carelessness belies the truth, for how I loved that creature, my devotion so furious that wresting him from me for school or a bath became a complicated battle of bribery and threat – one you did not always win, for I remember at least one occasion when he shared my murky bathwater, despite your insistence he would go mouldy and bad.

  Charles was his name. I shan’t even ask you if you remember the day we got him, because of course you do. How could you not?

  I had staked my future on the possibility of a life like the ones I read about in books and saw on television, and never more so than at Christmas. I wanted tinsel, turkey and, if not a flaming pudding, then a Wall’s Viennetta for dessert. I wanted a jumbo tin of Quality Street, its foil-wrapped contents gleaming like a pirate’s stolen treasure; I wanted the Ghost of Christmas Future to show me my glittering career; I wanted an angel to visit me and show me what a sad, broken world it would be if I were not in it. But more than anything, I wanted an invitation to the Trevelyans’ annual Christmas Eve party.

  After tea, I would watch from the window as Mr Trevelyan bundled Tom and Harry into the car for the Christmas tree service, where they would sing like angels, then nobly donate last year’s worn-out presents to ‘poor people’. Then, and I knew this only from Harry’s retelling and my own vivid imagination, they would be ferried home, already dressed in their best party outfits underneath their brand-new coats, to await the arrival of the guests, including Mr Evans, who was the captain of the Golf Club; Mrs Baxter, who was the principal of the ballet school, to which I was not admitted; and a man who had written a book about bees and had once been on Blue Peter, although Tom said he dropped cigarette ash on the carpet so his mum might not invite him again. I also knew there would be Shloer, which Harry said was wine for children and thus the holy grail of soft drinks; two kinds of crisps – plain and prawn cocktail – and Twiglets, all served in cut-glass bowls; along with pastel-coloured sugared almonds, which were edible as long as you just sucked the sugar off and then spat the nut in the bin when no one was looking.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so exciting about it,’ you say from the sofa. ‘There’s some apple juice in the fridge and we can buy some crisps from the Co-op tomorrow if they’re so bloody important.’

  ‘The Co-op’s shut tomorrow,’ I say sullenly. ‘It’s Christmas Day. Everything shuts on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Which is another reason why it’s a load of buggery bollocks.’ You smile, as if you have just potted black, or scored a hat trick.

  ‘We could just go to the church bit,’ I suggest, picturing a scene in which Mr Trevelyan insists we sit in their pew, and then chauffeurs us back to the Lodge in the Cortina and makes us the guests of honour.

  ‘What for?’ you ask.

  I rack my brains. ‘To give toys to a poor child.’

  You snort. ‘And who do you think this poor child is?’

  I shrug, imagining it’s Neville Watkins, who’s adopted, or one of the Priestley boys who I’ve seen picking up cigarette butts outside the White Horse for their dad, and who smell of smoke and wee.

  But you know better. ‘Take a look in the mirror,’ you say. ‘I don’t want their pity.’

  This is the first I have heard about us being
poor. I had assumed until then, going on my peers’ pronouncements, that we were merely weird. But now there is another frontier to fight against in my battle to be normal, though I am still not swayed in my determination.

  ‘If you pretended to believe in the Bible maybe they’d ask us,’ I say, with astounding insight into the workings of Angela’s head, but a complete lack of insight into yours.

  ‘I doubt that woman believes in anything but bloody Good Housekeeping magazine,’ you snort. ‘The difference is I don’t lie about it. Besides, Jesus will know she’s faking,’ you add, placing a sour cherry on top of your cake of disappointment.

  But I have noticed a chink in your armour. ‘That means Jesus is real, then.’

  You eye me, half irritated, half proud. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said nothing, clever clogs.’

  And you win again. For now.

  Because of course it isn’t your lack of piety that’s keeping us from the Trevelyans. It’s the absence of breeding, along with an utter abundance of everything else, particularly wit, cleavage, and ability to drink.

  But this year, the Winter of my Great Discontent, that is about to change.

  The Daimler pulls up at eleven twenty-eight on Christmas Day. I know this because I have checked the precise arrival time on my Mickey Mouse Timex watch, which I unwrapped at eight forty-seven. I have also opened a box of pink Turkish delight which tastes deliciously of soap (Toni); a purple purse with beads sewn on it in the letter D (the Trevelyans); and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange (Mrs Housden and Debbie the cat from next door). My stocking – an item you only allow by claiming it’s filled by Pan and some unnamed ‘goddesses of earthly abundance’ – contained four walnuts, a satsuma, a rubber that allegedly smells of grape, a spy pen that writes in invisible ink, and a Slinky, which is already broken from where I tried to skip with it, which you said would happen but that it was my present so I could do what I liked, so I did. Sometimes I wish you’d tell me to stop instead.