Playing Friends

by Marilyn Duckworth

  When we signed the papers for the flat I was under the impression — a warm thing, weighing on me like a comfortable old eiderdown — that I knew Una. She was a fossil from my solid childhood. Childhood had been a comfortable place with my mother and my father — married to each other, of course — and pocket money and my own bedroom. I'd chosen a kidney-shaped dresser with a padded stool in front because Elizabeth Taylor had one in Father of the Bride. I saw Una as solid and reliable too, barring the familiar tricks of old age. After all, I'd known her — well sort of — for nearly forty years. At school she was one of the sporting types, admirable, mentioned warmly in assembly. Her sort could be relied on to feature in the yearly sports-day calendar and grin from photographs in the school magazine, while I only figured once in a drama production, nearly out of shot. We studied the school magazine before we moved in and there was Una, chin angled smugly. Who better to share an apartment with?

  'It goes like this,' she had said. 'You're nice and I'm not so nice. You're no fun exactly but I can live with that. So why don't I? Men die first anyway. We could be good together.'

  And then suddenly there was another person in the flat, a clumsy teenager with a loose belly and a big voice, when she wasn't submerged, gluey eyed like a drunk, under the influence of her Walkman. Shit, a cuckoo in my nest. But not for long. Sheree would be giving up the baby for adoption, thank God, and could find her own way in the world from there. She'd be sixteen going on thirty, as Una was fond of saying, and eligible for a youth benefit, if she was unemployed, which seemed likely. She had no qualifications and no ambitions to acquire any, according to Una. She could take herself off to share a flat with others her own age once she'd got herself sorted. So six months at most.

  'I should have made it clearer that Sheree would need to move in with us. Are you really okay with it? We can hardly turn the kid out on the street in her condition.'

  'She's making the moves, no hooks, no con. She's getting connected but he's so gone. Here comes tomorrow, going down, going cheap, she wrapped the babydoll for the trash heap.'

  Sheree wagged her head to the Walkman.

  I combed the apartment snatching up the detritus of this creature just turned sixteen, Una's 'little cuzzie'. Carelessly pregnant. A discarded rag of panties in the bathroom, a mangled Red Bull can and half a muesli bar under a sofa cushion, chewing gum clinging onto the rim of a kitchen cup.

  'She's not really my cousin,' Sheree muttered. 'You don't believe that do you?'

  'Pardon?'

  'Yeah — well, we're sort of related, eh?'

  'What are you saying?'

  'I don't like that curry stuff. Do I have to have curry? Call her up on her mobile — she won't mind. The pizza place is right next door.'

  I stood very still in the kitchen. I was making up my mind whether to be disturbed by Sheree's disclaimer of cousin status. This wasn't the first time she'd confused me. The last time it had turned out the girl was quoting the words of a rap song, her favourite distraction, and they made no sense at all. She'd roared with laughter when I responded literally.

  'Come on, call her up. You must have the number.'

  'Sorry.' I made sure I didn't sound sorry. 'She'll be driving back by now. That's the way accidents happen.'

  'Oh yeah. You don't like me, do you? I'm not worth a phone call.'

  'It's got nothing to do with it. You ate curry happily enough last week.'

  'I didn't actually. I spewed up. I am pregnant, you know — I have to be careful what I put in my mouth. Never mind the other holes.' She giggled. 'I bet you don't even know who the father is. Didn't tell you that, did she? Well, it's her bloody Tyler. Fourteen years old and full of it. Pretty good, eh? Bet she didn't tell you that. But who cares who did it?'

  Sheree continued to talk in her flat, singsong monotone but I'd stopped listening. I had to deal with the kitchen mess, rinsing the lunch dishes under the hissing cold tap above the waste disposal and slamming the door of the dishwasher so that the faulty catch caught. 'You're not listening, are you?'

  'What?'

  I relented then. 'Look, Sheree, I know you like the idea of shocking me with your stories but you're not going to get very far with that. Despite what you think I haven't always been fifty-nine years old . . .'

  'Fifty-nine. Fuck.'

  'And besides being sixteen myself once upon a time, I've had kids that age so it's all quite boring really.'

  'Been there, done that?' The girl gave an ugly, rumbling snort. 'As if!'

  'Una's my friend, Sheree. I don't think much of the way you use her and then sling off at her when her back's turned.'

  'Sling off — what's that mean then? Shit, here comes curry. I can smell it. Yuk, yuk!'

  She was right. The rimu door swung, pressed open by Una's round forearm slung with aromatic plastic bags. The girl hovered, greedily watching steamy gravy slopping into the deep Chinese serving dish. She reached across to ladle a heaped amount onto a plate, rested it above her belly and headed for her bedroom.

  'So where are you going with that?'

  'I've got to eat, don't I?'

  'Sheree doesn't like curry,' I told Una, raising my eyebrows at the amount the girl had taken.

  'She likes everything with calories.'

  'Some things I like better than others,' Sheree muttered.

  'Yup. That's the way life goes,' Una agreed. She shouted after the girl. 'Don't leave the plate under your bed!'

  At the table Una shut her mascaraed eyes while she ate, signalling satisfaction. The room was noticeably expanded by Sheree's departure, silence creeping back into its corners like sunshine replacing shadow. The shiny sofa cushions became softer, rounder, the light in the window gentler.

  'So who's this Tyler?' I asked Una.

  She sat up straighter. Her eyes were wide open now. 'What's she been saying?'

  'Says he's the father.'

  'Yeah, well he is, as far as I know.'

  'You know him?'

  'Yeah. Knew him.'

  'So he's not related to you?'

  'Is that what she said? Clarice, you don't have to listen to what Sheree comes out with. She makes things up. It's a way of getting attention. Can't help herself. If you listen long enough she'll say the opposite. It all goes round in circles and comes back as something else. Don't let it get you, Claz. It's only for a few months, eh?'

  'But you must believe some of what she says? You told me she's giving the baby up for adoption. Are you sure that's going to happen?'

  'Yup. Sure I'm sure. I've seen the papers. She'd never manage on her own with a baby. She's a selfish sixteen-year-old looking to have a good time and she won't get that here. Relax. If she turns difficult we'll get her out some other way. I won't let it go on and on. I promise.'

  Beryl

  Beryl, who had been alone for nearly twenty-six years, since Donald left her for a yellow-haired bank teller, sometimes woke in the night and panicked because he wasn't in the house, not even in another bedroom. There was every chance she would die alone. Perhaps she would have a stroke and find herself unable to move, unable to cry out. And who, anyway, would she cry to? When she was seven she was immobilised with cramp in the school swimming baths and nearly drowned. She had swallowed her voice. The water turned black over her head and she was threshing in a narrow tunnel while steel chains tightened and clanked about her ribs. Now when she panicked at night she woke tearing the chains from her chest and dragging on the curtain beside her bed. One side of the floral cotton had stretched. She planned one day to take down the left-hand curtain and exchange it for the right-hand folds of blue cloth, but time went on and the curtain lengthened on one side, unchecked.

  In the little kitchen, after one of these panic attacks, she confronted the day over the rim of her tea cup, and sent the nasty feeling packing out of the high window. She always used a matching saucer because it mattered.

  'I know it's daft,' she said to Greg Preston, a main character from her favourite old television
series, who sometimes came and sat at the table with her. 'Help yourself to the sugar. I wouldn't buy it for myself but it can't hurt someone like you. You've never had a weight problem and you're not likely to now.' And she laughed, because she knew it was eccentric to be talking to someone who wasn't exactly there. Or was it Beryl who wasn't exactly there? There were days when she wondered.

  She had played with an invisible friend when she was four years old. 'If it was okay then,' she murmured to Greg, 'why not now, when I really need one? I really do need you,' she said and her chin crumpled because she was feeling sorry for herself, which was certainly childish. Her childhood friend had been without gender, like a ventriloquist's doll that had never been fully finished or suitably dressed. It had become something she could fondle and hug, more like a docile dog than a human being.

  Greg reminded her that in fact he died in the last TV series, riding off with a nose bleed, bravely planning to infect the enemy with a fatal strain of smallpox.

  'I know that,' Beryl agreed. 'Jag har kopporsjuk.' She knew the dialogue by heart, even the bits in Swedish. 'But that was only telly. Telly is lies. Specially reality TV. I know perfectly well you went off screen and had a bath and probably a whisky.'

  There was gin, she remembered, in the glass cabinet. But not at breakfast time. Certainly not.

  At the supermarket Beryl's trolley passed a woman she felt sure she recognised from somewhere. She wore pleasant, familiar features like a TV personality. Possibly a customer from her days at the bookshop or, more probably, her stint at the local library — this redhead couldn't be more than fifty. Beryl, who had allowed her skin to dry and her hair to fade, regularly misread the ages of other women. In the new millennium sixty might be the new fifty, but not for Beryl. From time to time she encountered past acquaintances and their mild, friendly nods of acknowledgement would degenerate inevitably to a blank response as their lives filled up with layers of more relevant faces. It was hardly worth giving away a smile. She felt safer keeping these for complete strangers like the checkout girls, or for the younger shoppers, the mothers with babies rocking in the carryseats and children diving for lollies at the till.

  A second encounter with the same woman at the biscuit shelves elicited the trace of a smile and as it flickered under her nose, Beryl remembered. School. This woman had been at the reunion, flaunting her red hair, more red, in fact, than when she was a small girl in the junior school with a glossy tie and blazer; more self-possessed than she had ever been. Beryl's school blazer had been second-hand, decently faded even before she was enrolled. Now she lowered her thinning grey mop and blushed at the unexciting contents of her trolley. The other woman's trolley was already bulging with French bread sticks, pink chicken breasts and posh ice cream. A shiny eggplant and an outsize pineapple lolled above packets of fancy lettuce.

  It didn't matter anyway for the woman had failed to smile back. She was busy waving at her friend, another woman with too much lipstick and a skirt too tight for her bottom.

  'Batteries! She said to remind you. For the Walkman.

  Okay?'

  Beryl reached for a six-pack of tonic to go with the gin in the glass cabinet. Mother's ruin. That was a joke. Did that mean gin couldn't hurt someone like her, who had known nothing of mothering? She had talked to Greg at length about her miscarriages, after the break-up when she was first on her own, a separated woman. It was all part of the same loss. The TV series had comforted her at the time, in 1976. The characters — deprived of all that was familiar in their lives by a virus, 'The Death', which had alighted from a Chinese plane at Heathrow — seemed closer to herself than anyone in her daily life. There was really no one else. When Donald went she discovered her friends were actually the wives of his friends — (they listened sometimes to 2ZB and bought Truth) — and didn't want to know her. That was the meanest trick of his departure. As well as Survivors on the box — the original series, not the silly reality show that had stolen the name — there was the zoo. She could talk to the monkeys. I saw a squashed banana on the road.

  Ahead of her the till swallowed money with a satisfied 'delunk'. There was muzak on the speakers; voices rose and dipped in Beryl's left ear, which was stronger than her right. On her right the young Indian girl was reminding her to enter her PIN but she didn't hear. She didn't hear because there was a larger noise resounding somewhere in the bowels of the store. Someone was screaming, a high continuous scream on one long note. It came closer. She saw the red-headed woman turn toward the sound and toss her chin up in surprise. Had something happened to the friend with the tight leather skirt? No. A very young girl with cheeky plaits, noticeably pregnant, pranced out of the freezer aisle, her mouth wide open so that amalgam fillings glinted over her fat tongue. The leather skirt was striding behind her.

  'What are you doing?' Una asked Sheree, not kindly. 'You're supposed to be at home. Stop it!'

  The pregnant girl's mouth dropped shut and spasmed into a satisfied smile. She giggled and shrugged. 'You told me I should get more exercise.'

  'I didn't tell you to scream. What have you got there anyway?'

  The girl handled two packets of Honey Bumbles. She wagged them cheekily. 'Oh, and this.' A can of Red Bull protruded from her side pocket.

  'Sugar. What good is all that sugar for a growing baby?'

  'Why should I care?'

  'You don't have any money.'

  'But you'll buy them for me, won't you?'

  Beryl's attention was riveted on this exchange. The checkout girl had given up asking her to 'Enter your PIN, please' and sat back, casting her gaze up at the high ceiling.

  'What you staring at, bitch?'

  This was directed at Beryl and galvanised her into turning from the scene and noticing the checkout girl's expression. She started. 'Oops, sorry.' She smiled and entered the wrong figure, twice.

  She was in the foyer loading the contents of her trolley into the wheelie bag when the three women passed her, calling obscure remarks to each other, as mysterious to Beryl as another language, as if aging were a tunnel into a foreign country. She kept her head down but couldn't help noticing that the pregnant girl had let her top ride up so that an expanse of swollen midriff was displayed to the weather. Her tummy was whiter than her round face. Beryl shivered and tucked her paisley scarf into her collar.

  The row of silver garage doors had all been allocated by the time we purchased our apartment so Una was often forced to park the car on a very steep street some distance from our entrance. At this time of day, even on a Saturday, the parking spaces in the street were crammed with vehicles belonging to city workers or customers of the wholesale carpet business along the road. I'd sold my Toyota in view of this and had to rely on Una for transport when we did our weekly shop; it helped to make up for the extra power costs incurred by Sheree. There was a further adjustment in weekly household expenses, which would need to be revised when Sheree went. We didn't talk about Una's finances but I assumed she received some dependant's benefit for the girl. She reached into the car boot, hauling out bags and passing them to Sheree, who at once passed them on to me.

  'How's about some money?' the girl asked her. 'Like ten? Or five? I've got a bit, but . . .'

  'Where are you going?'

  'None of your business. Just coffee money. You can be rid of me, eh?'

  Una glared. I juggled fingers into my pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. Six dollars and a few five cent pieces.

  'Ta. See ya.'

  Una and I balanced a share of the supermarket bags between us and ducked through the swell of airport traffic, running the last few steps with cans and bottles and the pineapple bouncing against our legs. Someone on a higher floor must have left the lift doors open so we gave up waiting and climbed the two steep flights of thinly carpeted stairs.

  I complained. 'Bloody hell. We should shop more often.'

  'What?'

  'If we go more often we won't have so much to lug back.'

  'Oh. Right.' Una pu
ffed loudly on the stairs. She had a lot more flesh on her than me and her face sometimes deepened to an alarming shade of red.

  'You were right anyway, I have to say.' I hoisted and dumped my share of shopping on the steel kitchen bench, reaching to catch an escaping nectarine.

  'About?'

  'Sheree. She is nuts. I thought you were exaggerating at first, but no. Definitely bonkers. Certifiable.'

  Una, who'd begun to laugh, tightened her mouth in a sort of frown, shaking her fake hair. 'No. Not certifiable.'

  'Pity. Someone else could look after her. Someone professional. Or maybe not — in the current economy.'

  She screwed up her eyes. 'You can be hard, can't you?'

  'What? You can't say you like having her here? You shout at her. I'm just being practical. I'm a very practical person.' I dropped teabags into mugs and switched on the electric jug. 'Remind me — is she your sister's child or . . . And where . . . ?'

  'Practical's right. Yeah — a very lucky person, actually. I envy you.'

  'Because I'm practical?'

  'Goes like this: you're a person who takes things as they come. You take risks. Look at me — this place. I could start ripping you off. You expect things to go right, to work out.'

  'They usually do. Well, I manage when they don't. There's always a way of coping.'

  'See? That's what I mean. You don't get depressed.'

  I felt offended. 'I'm certainly not happy all the time.

  I get depressed when I have to. My first husband died — I have told you. Well, you know what that feels like. We both know what that feels like. But life goes on, doesn't it?'

  'You don't know what depressed means.'

  I bridled and burnt my lip on hot tea. How the hell did she know what I did or didn't feel? Was she accusing me of having no finer feelings? Then I thought again and looked at Una more closely. 'Do you? Know what it means?'

  She gave an exaggerated shrug as if her shoulders hurt. 'I did see someone about it once. A therapist woman. Cost me an arm and a leg.' She wagged one arm and one leg. 'See? Very depressing to the bank balance. She gave it a very expensive name. No, I'm okay. If I go down you'll just have to suffer me till I'm up again. I know I can rely on you for that.'