by Bruno Noble
Isabella
Kimberley and I spent our time together in the confines of the home and its garden, the prospect of the outside world clearly perturbing her. The physical demands of excursions were beyond her, such was her obesity and breathlessness, exceptions being made for the short bus journeys to public libraries. Little by little, as though following a courtship protocol or playing a board game that required stops and starts and lucky card picks, we exchanged information about our recent histories and, more specifically, about our coping mechanisms and states of mind.
Kimberley had sought refuge in books and food. Literature had provided her with an escape route to the extent, she said, that the worlds of some books became more real to her than her own, to the point at which the knowledge of a book’s imminent ending would detract from her pleasure in it, as she knew that she would soon have to suffer the interval that came between its end and the start of the next. Books provided vicarious travel – both geographic and temporal, given her penchant for Victorian novels – and, as importantly, a form of therapy by proxy: she was every heroine, every jilted lover, every mother, every sister.
Kimberley laid five fat fingers and a sweaty palm on my arm when she asked after Cosmo and, having listened to me tell of his gradual habilitation, squeezed it and said, to my immense pleasure and relief, in a voice in an even higher register than usual, ‘Don’t chastise yourself for it. You did what you could. He is lucky to have you as a sister.’ She knew, she understood and, momentarily, I loved her intensely for it, although not without thinking that she was speaking like the character of a friend or confidante she had discovered in a novel.
We had been on a one-stop bus journey when she had said to me amid breathy giggles, ‘Having read Tess and excited at the prospect of the Hardy books ahead of me and having determined to read them in order, I marched – well, waddled – into the library and asked for Dramatic Recipes and, when they said they didn’t have it, I gave them so much stick! And – can you believe! – I’d got the title wrong: it was Desperate Remedies! Well, they were good to me, they didn’t bat an eyelid though if I’d been them I’d have told me I’d obviously had enough dramatic recipes and didn’t need another!’ I loved her then, too, for her ability to be self-deprecating, for her admission of her errors and, frequently, for her forgiving what she referred to as my literary lacunae: it was she who made me realise that, having been ahead of my reading age when a child, I had stopped reading much when an adolescent, and she who pressed books into my hands whenever I left her room.
Kimberley preferred Victorian novelists because they addressed sex less openly, more obliquely – if she hated anything, it was talk of sex or its sudden, unexpected description in a book or depiction in a film. Sex, for Kimberley, was where books met food. ‘I hate my body. I hate what they did to it. My body, well, it was just a sack of body parts for my uncle and your dad’ – here, she placed a hand on my arm as if in apology – ‘and for others to sift through. I thought that I could reclaim it from them, you know, make it mine again and, it’s strange, but being fat made me feel safer, it was like I was making my body big to protect myself, making myself undesirable to them.’ Kimberley wheezed when she talked at length. ‘And look at you!’ she panted. ‘Skinny as a rake!’
‘You and me…’ I said. ‘Between the two of us, on average, we’d have –’
‘Two fat people!’ interrupted Kimberley, wheezing and gasping in laughter. She lowered her eyes and I looked down upon the pale cream of her eyelids and long, fair eyelashes. For a moment she was the young girl in Papa’s study. ‘The thing is,’ she said quietly, ‘that I don’t want to be attractive to anybody, but then it’s not nice for me not being attractive to myself. The doctors say I should lose weight for my health but I am happier being overweight because I feel safer. But then…’ She lowered her voice so I had to hold my breath to hear her. ‘I’m letting them destroy not only my life but my health too.’
‘It’s just so unjust,’ I said, more to myself than to Kimberley.
‘Miss Heverfet and Miss Robbie have a plan for me,’ said Kimberley abruptly. ‘I’m to go back to school, go to sixth-form college, take my English A level, study English at university and become an English teacher. And I’ll walk to college to lose weight so that nobody teases me. And so that my health improves.’
The chimes of an ice-cream van two streets away were audible.
We were quiet a moment, sitting on the bench at the bottom of the garden that received the last warmth of the sun at the end of the day, Kimberley occupying half of the bench that creaked when she shifted her weight, our home and refuge in silhouette in front of us, its odd mix of pebbledash and mock Tudor gabling faint and blurred against the pale disc of the low sun as though observed through the fine mesh of a butterfly cage.
‘What I really want to do,’ stated Kimberley seriously, quietly, ‘is to spend the rest of my life here, eating and reading.’ The prospect of having to leave the home terrified her. ‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see why? Why would anyone want to leave? I hate it that I have to have a plan to leave. How can you all seem so indifferent about leaving?’
‘The thing is, about being here, for me, being in this home, any home, even my foster home, it feels like a punishment. It was Cosmo and I who were sent from the family home, not my father. It was as though we were being punished, as though we were the ones who had done something wrong. And then being sent to a care home from my foster home – that felt like another unfair punishment. I know it’s okay here but…’ I shrugged. ‘And it’s been nice to have you as a friend,’ I added. I leant against her and the warmth of her body fused with the warmth of the sun. Her arm was the size of my leg.
Freddie approached us from the house. She was carrying a plastic bag in one hand and waved with the other.
‘Freddie’s going to go to London to become a singer,’ said Kimberley, resignedly. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to go with her. Once I’ve finished school.’
‘Budge up,’ said Freddie and handed us each an ice lolly.
Freddie had revealed her story only slowly, over months, in stages at which she’d measure our responses before, having deemed them appropriate, she’d reveal yet more of herself to us. What element of disbelief we felt lay, for Kimberley and me, in the fact that Freddie had suffered at the hands of a dissolute mother, an alcoholic and a bully, and not at those of a father who, contrary to Kimberley’s and my experiences, had been his daughter’s protector and companion and, ultimately, his wife’s victim. This inversion of roles had been a source of fascination for me and I had quizzed Freddie about it as gently and considerately as I could.
Freddie’s father had been a man who, receiving an income from a family trust, had devoted his time to listening to music, to music journalism and, eventually, to a wife who, reportedly attractive when tipsy during their courtship, had become monstrous when continually drunk in marriage. Freddie believed that the only thing that had attracted her mother to her father had been his wealth and its implications for a steady supply of gin, her propensity for which had risen on her realising that his income was not all she had thought it to be. The more forgiving her father had been of her depravity, the more she had taken advantage of his kindness and his purse, and the more tolerant he had been of her degeneracy the more she had despised him for it. Freddie, naturally, had sought sanctuary from her volatile and frightening mother in her father’s company. Her happier memories were of the two of them in their sitting room, she cross-legged on the floor amid LP covers and sleeveless records, and her father standing, wobbling on a battered leather pouffe in passionate imitation of Arturo Toscanini or Sir Thomas Beecham, and the music loud enough to drown out either her mother’s screams that they turn the music down or her cries in the throes of love-making in the bedroom directly above the sitting room with the men whom Freddie hated to cross on the stairs of her father’s house.
One evening, recounted Freddie, as sh
e had been hugging her knees on the sitting room’s cream shag carpet and admiring her father’s unsteady conducting of an opera while she followed the libretto open on the floor beside her, her mother had walked in and brought the sharp heels of her shoes down on the record player and faced her husband defiantly, a shoe in each hand. She had broken the record and the arm of the record player that had kept on revolving and, in the immediate silence that had followed, Freddie had become aware of its soft hum for the first time that had then blended with the commencement of her father’s profound, welling bellow as though he had only then decided to express years of repressed hate and misery. After the fight that had ensued, of one conductor’s baton against two stiletto heels, Freddie’s father, having stabbed and nearly strangled his wife to death, had staggered out into the road and into the path of an oncoming motorcycle, blinded, it was later suggested, by the blood in his eyes.
Freddie had stayed mesmerised by a drop of blood that had arced through the air and fallen miraculously on one, and only one, thick fibre of the shag carpet that would forever, in her mind, remain an erect scarlet reproach in a turbulent creamy sea of her inactivity – not just then, as her parents had fought, but throughout her life, as she had neglected and shrunk from her mother and allowed the chasm that had appeared between her parents to widen.
Freddie had then been sent to a foster home and, when her liaison with her foster father had been discovered by her foster mother, to the care home. ‘Mr Johnston said that I look for my father in every man I meet,’ Freddie had said. ‘Urgh. He’s such a creep. He needs to wash his hair. And he doesn’t understand. Anyway, who cares if he’s right. It’s not as though I ever shagged or wanted to shag my father. Sorry.’ She had squeezed my knee and looked apologetically at Kimberley.
*
I think I became Miss Heverfet’s and Miss Robbie’s greatest disappointment. ‘Going to London is not a plan,’ insisted Miss Heverfet testily, but I could see no further than that. I saw myself escaping a butterfly pavilion for the great unknown. Only sixty miles away and yet so far. From Summertown, to Iffley and to Littlemore, five miles in the right direction across Oxford’s suburbs in eighteen years, and now, any day soon, sixty miles in an afternoon. The hum of traffic on the distant dual carriageways as I lay awake was, for me, the big city’s siren call.
The connectedness of everything material and external to me – that one could be in a bus on an Oxford street and only a little later be on London’s Oxford Street, was magical and yet frightening. It mirrored the internal trauma I had undergone when recollections of the nocturnal activities in Papa’s study had intruded when I had embraced Tomasz and, later, contemplated a greater intimacy with other boys. I listened to two voices, one of which expressed its disgust that I could even contemplate a sexual act, no matter if it was borne out of an affection for a boy my own age, and the other that filled my mind with obscenities and encouraged me to promiscuity in order to demonstrate my liberation from Papa, to assert my freedom from his control.
The butterfly in me flew infrequently, having entered a long period of hibernation. Without daring to examine my motive too closely, I hoped that London would awaken it and coax it out; London, where I would discover whether I had the courage to embrace sexual liberation and unlock the cage of my body.
‘But what are you going to do in London?’ persisted Miss Heverfet. ‘You can’t just go there!’ But I could. Freddie had a music course to follow, a part-time job and an apartment to live in that I could live in too. I had maintenance money from Papa that would continue until I was twenty-one and money from Uncle James who thrust it at me on his infrequent visits.
On the day Freddie and I took the bus to the coach station, the day of Kimberley’s tearful farewell and the day after I had said goodbye to Cosmo, the Bobeckyjs and the Baldocks, I had everything I owned in two cardboard suitcases.
Sharon
I had exchanged school for secretarial college and left my parents in order to live with my aunt. I had given up acting, as a child, to act as an adult. I had swapped my school uniform for that of a girl about town. I abstained from casual sexual encounters and missed them. I had grown up English and Catholic only to find that I was not quite either.
Close to home, I’d wander Wandsworth Park, which borders the Thames, and, secretarial college finished for the day, further afield: Hyde Park and then Green or St James’s Parks, losing and finding myself along gravel paths. The holes in the ground no longer materialised in mockery of me and the elves stayed hidden within the bushes’ dense leaves, lying in wait for me to fall into a false sense of security. Could this all mean that I was finally becoming a person? I thought so; I hoped so, but what kind of one? I couldn’t tell.
Secretarial college finished for good. I needed to find work and could think of nothing better than taking Aunt Wanda’s advice to heart: I took my CV and newly polished shoes, shiny tights and best business suit to recruitment firms in the City where I applied for secretarial positions with the banks. The interview process was an interesting one: I, too, wanted to be on the other side of the desk in my ongoing attempt to pin down this green-eyed, nervous, humourless secretary-to-be whose hair was pulled back into a bun and who failed to progress in a succession of interviews. I, too, wanted to ask her questions that I knew she wouldn’t have the answers to.
Wanda set me right. ‘Don’t be so defensive. Remember, they’re interviewing you because they need you or someone like you. Your CV ticks all the boxes so, really, by the time you’re sitting across the table from them, their only question is, Do I want to work with this person? So be the person they’d like to spend eight hours a day with and ask questions. Remember, you’re interviewing them too. Show interest, and that where you work is important to you. And do your homework.’
‘My homework?’
‘Yes, your research. Research the company you’re interviewing with so you can have some questions for them.’
There must have been something in Wanda’s words, because I got the next job I interviewed for. Either that or the bohemian, vaguely cynical and confused air of the personnel manager, who seemed like a fish out of water in his black polyester suit in the City, was enough to make me relax sufficiently to interview well. Mr Self sat forward in a swivel chair holding my CV in both hands and said, ‘Next, you’re going to meet Jonathan, who’s head of the UK sales team and then Curtis, Guy and Kate. Relax,’ he added, and raised his hand as though to pat mine, then thought better of it. ‘You’ll do fine.’
Jonathan was a big bumbling fellow who immediately put me further at my ease. He emanated wordless apology for his clumsy manner and the space he took up in a room. He squeezed into the chair Mr Self had vacated. ‘You know,’ he said by way of preamble, waving my CV in the air as though it were an irrelevance, ‘that the sterling market hasn’t decimalised yet?’
I smiled.
‘We still work in fractions.’
I nodded, unsure of where he was going.
‘You’re good with numbers, it says here.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said.
‘So if I give you some fractions, will you be able to give me their decimal equivalent?’
‘I think so,’ I replied, uncertain.
‘What are three-quarters expressed in decimal terms?’
‘0.75.’
‘What are five-eighths?’
‘0.625.’
‘Three-sixteenths?’
I halved an eighth and added it to an eighth and said after only a little delay, ‘0.1875.’
Jonathan pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and said, ‘You’re in as far as I’m concerned,’ and left the room bellowing for Curtis.
I stood as I waited for Curtis and looked through the glass partition wall into the trading room. It was as exciting and alien as it was alluring. Suddenly conscious of the increasing number of approving male eyes facing my direction, I turned to find I was no longer alone.
‘Hi,’ said a young preppy-lo
oking American, who shook my hand and closed the door behind him before sitting down.
Pushing my CV to one side, he leant forward conspiratorially and I found my body language imitating his. ‘Say,’ he said. ‘Nice shoes. And nice valise!’ he added, fingering what I would have called my folder or, if I had wanted to impress, attaché case, which I had placed on the table. ‘Are they genuine plastic?’
‘No!’ I exclaimed, reclining abruptly. ‘Well the shoes aren’t, but I don’t know about – that.’
‘Good. Now, tell me, do you give good back rubs?’
Astonished, I laughed weakly.
‘On-ly kid-ding!’ he sang. ‘Good! You passed the sterling desk sense of humour test!’ Curtis sat forward all of a sudden, serious now. ‘What is a bond?’
‘Er, an IOU.’
‘What is a gilt?’
I thought hard, back to the research Wanda had had me do. ‘A bond of the UK government?’
He didn’t seem impressed.
‘It’s when the UK government borrows money,’ I added.
‘That will do,’ he said. ‘Do you have any questions?’