Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  My mother took me the first time. We walked. The roads round our way are flat, and perfectly straight, laid out on a grid pattern. I was surprised to find that the house where I was to have piano lessons was just like other houses. I had imagined it would be enormous and grand. The sound of musical instruments would drift out from tall, open windows. There ought to be huge trees around it, and hedges and lawns, and a wide flight of stone steps up to the front door. I didn't recall imagining this beforehand; it was just that when we got to the little pebble-dashed semi I realized that that was what I'd expected. Not a concrete path, rose bushes snicked down to their knuckles, and a holder for milk bottles in the porch with a dial to tell the milkman how many to leave.

  My mother rang the bell. The door was opened just a foot wide by someone who peered round it suspiciously: a youngish woman, dumpy, with rollers in her hair. Was this the musical type?

  'I'll take you through to Mum,' she muttered.

  We squeezed awkwardly round the door and into the narrow hallway. A big pushchair took up most of the space. I noticed a little boy at the back of the hall. He was bumping a push-along toy crossly against the skirting board.

  We were shown into the front room. The piano was there, along with a dining table piled with folded ironing, a mirror engraved with flowers, a kitten calendar on the wall. So disappointingly domestic.

  Another dumpy woman, much older, dressed in a grass-green Crimplene frock, turned round to us from the piano bench. She looked like anyone you might see walking down our road, pegging out washing, getting off a bus.

  'So this is Carol. I'm Mrs Wallis.'

  I gave her a tight smile. My mother hovered, somewhere between the ironing and the mirror.

  Mrs Wallis pointed to the bench, and I sat down. She showed me how to find middle C, which I already knew. And so we began.

  If someone was having a lesson when you arrived, you waited on a seat in the dark hallway. The busy times were after school on weekdays and on Saturday mornings. The little boy could sometimes be heard crying, or his mother shouting, or someone would run noisily up the stairs. All quite thrilling, compared to our house. Mrs Wallis, when she heard these things, would sigh between clenched teeth. She had large hands which she brought down firmly on my hands, and later, when I got on to the pedals, she would sometimes press down with her foot on my foot. It was an odd way of being guided, like being crushed. And you couldn't do anything right under her physical force, you couldn't find the right place because you were just held there, and the next time, on your own, it would be back to guesswork, as usual.

  *

  But I met Barbara at the piano teacher's. She was sitting in the hall one day when I arrived. 'I know you,' she said. 'You live next door to us.'

  I was astounded. I didn't recognize her at all.

  'You live next door to us in Cromer Road. You live in the bungalow. The one with the windmill.'

  She was right. There was a model windmill in one of the front garden beds. I omitted to mention it when I described the garden. It wasn't quite a garden gnome; it was a windmill.

  'I don't know you,' was all I said.

  'I'm Barbara Hennessy,' she told me, as if that would jog my memory. I shook my head. Upstairs there was a crash, and a wail. In the front room a rendering of 'The Bells of St Mary's' fell apart and then carried, falteringly, on.

  'She's not married, you know,' Barbara said with a glittering look, glancing at the ceiling. 'All the parents think they're being dead brave and compassionate sending their kids here for piano lessons. Helping Grandma pay the bills.'

  None of this made any sense to me, but I loved the way her face assumed a wicked expression. Maybe I'd never seen a wicked smile before. I asked her if she had a lesson next but she said she was just there to pick up some music. Her lessons were usually on Saturday mornings, and this was a Tuesday. I was relieved, in a way, because if she had a lesson booked I was sure she had more right to it than I, who also had one booked then. I had never waited with anyone else on that uncomfortable seat before.

  She went in to collect her music. I heard her voice, to and fro with the piano teacher's, just like two adults having a conversation. She came out, smiled at me, said, 'I'll see you around,' and then, at the front door, 'What's your name?'

  I slurred it. I tried the Carolyn trick. Perhaps it would work.

  *

  Later my lessons were changed to Saturday mornings. My mother had stopped accompanying me by then; it took up too much of her time. I walked there on my own.

  I went in as Barbara came out. She always smiled at me. Then one day she was still there after my lesson. Not on the seat, but in the road outside.

  I came out into the sunshine and turned right on to the chipped asphalt pavement. Barbara appeared from a gateway, from between hedges: an apparition. She had on a red tartan kilt, a cream woolly jumper. Her hair was messy and loose and fell into her face. A kilt and a cream jumper and messy hair were suddenly my aspirations in life.

  'Are you going home?' she asked, and we walked together. My heart was bumping with excitement in my chest, and I must have had a stupid grin on my face all the way back to Cromer Road. Because Barbara had waited, expressly for me.

  I've just met someone, the first person I've encountered in this place who isn't a zombie. Thank God. I was getting jolly lonely. Her name is Hanny Gombrich, which is another good thing.

  I like to have a friend, an accomplice.

  5

  Activity

  They've put me down for Activity.

  That's what they do here. You don't choose an activity, or do an activity. You get put down for it.

  Mike came into my room and told me. 'Come on, Carol. You can't stay here all day. I've put you down for Activity.'

  His voice is falsely jolly. I can see from the look in his eyes that he's afraid I won't go along with it, won't go along with all the enthusiastic suggestions about chats and activities and time for tea. And what if I don't? Then he'll have to use an alternative method of persuasion. I've seen a few examples of that already: not a pretty sight. So I get up off my bed and follow him. Besides, I'm curious.

  I can't imagine what kind of activity it will be that scrupulously avoids the use of scissors, knives, needles and pins, thread or wire, or there again, blunt instruments. Every minute of the day in here, we have to be saved from ourselves. Or each other.

  On the way to the back of the building, where Activity takes place, we walk down a corridor beside a courtyard. I've never been down here before. In the yard two washing lines are strung with tea towels and plain, white, functional-looking aprons. They're flapping and struggling in the wind. For some reason that makes me feel happy. Maybe because they look as if at any second one of them might take off. I follow Mike slowly, keeping an eye on those energetic aprons for as long as I can.

  Whatever it was my dad got up to at Gough Electricals, it required him to wear a blue boiler suit. He had two – one on, and one in the wash. When I was little I hated to see that man-shaped blue outfit swinging on the washing line, puffing up in the wind. It frightened me, made me afraid to go outside. Worse was sometimes if Dad had a holiday and my mother took the opportunity to wash the two boiler suits at once. Then they would hang side by side on the line. It was all too easy for me to imagine a whole family of brothers who worked at Gough's, a line full of boiler suits, a human-sized row of cut-out blue paper dollies dancing their way menacingly down the garden. I wasn't normally a nervous child, I was just full of fancy, and sometimes the fancies took me in the wrong direction.

  Whatever he needed the boiler suit for, my mother wouldn't let him go out of the house in it. Boiler suits were not as respectable as she would have liked him to be. So he took it in a canvas bag, and set off for work in a white shirt and a brown tartan tie, brown jacket and cavalry twill trousers. Not quite a suit, not proclaiming falsely, 'Here is a man in a suit, who goes to work in an office.' But certainly not overalls. Heaven forbid overalls.

>   Then they invented drip-dry nylon shirts and she bought him some of those. She was always eager to sample the modern, to find labour-saving new inventions. He had one white, one blue and one cream nylon shirt. They billowed disgustingly on the line, like swollen corpses. The white one soon faded to cream, the cream one turned nicotine-yellow. The blue one stayed blue. He went back to his white cotton shirts that Mum had to iron. He wore the nylon shirts for gardening, sweating away inside them, because she said they were too good to throw out.

  'They're still fit for something,' she said. 'They're not finished yet.'

  They never would wear out. That was how she was.

  *

  It was clay. The Activity was clay.

  I haven't touched clay since my last year at junior school. I haven't smelled that smell – wet and earthy. Gravelike.

  They had already cut out our bits of clay for us; they were taking no chances. Otherwise we might strangle each other with the cheese-wire or poke our own eyes out. When we came into the room, the little cubes were already wired off and set on wooden boards in front of each place at the table. A woman called Dulcie was running the show. She stood at the front in a clay-smeared coat, and watched us shuffle in.

  'Hello, everybody. Sit down.'

  A long pause, while chairs scraped and we glanced resentfully at each other's bits of clay, to see if they were bigger or smaller.

  'Now, you can make anything you want with your clay, so long as you use your hands. I want to see those fingers really working!'

  We couldn't have those sharp wooden scrapers, the wire-ended moulders, the neat metal scalpels, that I remembered from school. You could try to mould a shape using just your fingers, or, with Dulcie's hovering help, make a pot. Or just tear it up and roll it into little balls and drop it on the floor, as the woman next to me did. No one batted an eyelid. It was all Activity.

  When I did clay at school we had to make a coil pot. No choice about it, a coil pot was what you made. The teacher in charge of the pottery room was very particular. She really didn't like just anyone getting into her pottery lessons, and so there were only about half a dozen children who ever progressed beyond coil pots to glazed animals, and vases, and moulded tiles. Goodness knows how much money had been spent by the generous county council on the pottery room and the kiln, but only a handful of kids benefited.

  I couldn't make my coil pot work. The sausages of clay I rolled dried up so fast that they cracked and broke when I tried to force them into curves. So that was that – my one and only lesson with clay. Our class was sent back to drawing on shiny kitchen paper with blunt pencils, and to another teacher, a trainee, who drifted between the desks, saying everything we produced was 'Lovely. Lovely!'

  Rose, the woman next to me in Activity, kept pinching off little bits of clay and rolling them between the tips of her fingers, gazing all the while into the air. She dropped the clay balls on to the floor as if she didn't know what her fingers were doing. They pinched and rolled and then just – opened themselves. And hey presto, nothing there! Rose had a huge wart on the back of her ring finger, just where a diamond in an ostentatious setting would be. She wore no real rings, of course. (That's the sort of thing they remove from us, in case we find some fantastically ingenious way of injuring ourselves: stick our heads through them and hang ourselves, I would guess.) Rose didn't say a word, but sometimes a little squeak issued from the back of her throat.

  The only activity I've ever been any good at is piano. Legitimate activity, that is. It took me a long time, but eventually I was good at those scales, up and down, down and up, my fingers trilling so fast that you could barely follow the movement, like the whirring legs of a cartoon animal. I was damned good at 'The Bells of St Mary's'. I liked everyone to be able to hear me, all through the bungalow, plinking and plonking away. I liked to think of one of them coming in and saying, 'Oh, my dear, that was lovely. Now do play such-and-such for us.' I bet a Carolyn sort of mother would have said things like that. Encouraging things. Carolyn's mother would have sat down next to her on the piano stool, arranging her pleated chiffon skirts, and played a duet, elegant white fingers rippling like sea anemones over the keys. I bet she would.

  Perhaps I wasn't so good. Perhaps I was dire. Maybe there was nothing about my playing to admire, except the sheer volume. I was fond of the loud pedal and had got into the habit of pressing it down, before Mrs Wallis could press it down for me.

  Without even thinking about it, I found I had made a face out of my clay, a face dominated by a huge nose. A caricature sort of face. I squashed it up again before anyone could see what it was and deduce something about me from it.

  6

  The Wren

  'How come I haven't ever seen you at school?' I said to Barbara Hennessy, walking back from piano one day.

  This had become a habit. Every Saturday she'd wait for me and we'd walk home, slowly, together. I don't know what she did for half an hour while I had my lesson, but she was always there when I came out, jumping out from behind one hedge or another. Sometimes she didn't appear for yards, and I'd worry that she had finally got bored with me. But then, with a thump and a scattering of leaves and flower heads, she'd be there in front of me.

  Now she sounded very casual. 'We don't go to school that much.'

  She toed a pebble carefully along the line of kerb-stones. A strategic kind of pause, only I didn't know it then.

  'I've seen your school, I've seen them playing netball in the playground.' Her voice made netball sound disagreeable. 'Anyway, we don't go there. We go to the Wren.'

  And that was how I discovered that St John's C of E Primary School, run by the church and the county council, wasn't the only place you could go.

  'I've never heard of a school called the Wren.'

  'I'll show you it, if you like,' Barbara offered. 'It's not far.'

  It was far, but then that was Barbara, as I'd come to appreciate in time, always bending the truth to her own ends. We made a detour and eventually came to a long, leafy road full of old houses. I was looking for something I recognized as a school, peering as far as the end of the road, when Barbara stopped in front of one of the houses and said: 'This is it.'

  I stared at the ramshackle building. Enormous trees lined the front fence, and a big flight of steps ran up to the front door. It was like a distorted dream-version of the house I had imagined my piano lessons would take place in. Above the door was a half-moon window with 'Wren House' painted in curly script, but there was nothing – no noticeboard, no signs, no tarmac playground or netball posts – to indicate that this was a school. Except maybe the row of paper chains hanging in one of the front windows. I didn't know whether to believe her or not.

  'You can come with me one day,' Barbara offered. 'They won't notice.'

  They won't notice? It seemed to me that schools were designed to notice. They noticed whether you were there or not, whether you were late, even whether you arrived too early. They noticed if you were sitting up straight, if you weren't listening, if you were on the wrong page, if your pencil wasn't sharp enough. And they made it their business that everyone else noticed too. 'Now stop, everyone. Look at Peter. Has Peter got his left foot in the air, or his right foot? Which foot should he have in the air? That's right. Now show us, Peter. Show us you know which is your left foot.' I couldn't believe a school existed where they wouldn't notice me.

  'I'll have to get the day off my school,' I said.

  Barbara shrugged.

  'It won't be easy,' I told her.

  'Forge a letter from your mum, saying you're ill,' Barbara suggested, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

  We were never off school. We were never allowed to give in to coughs and sniffs and tummy aches. My mother liked us out of the house from eight thirty sharp until four o'clock, unless we were actually contagious.

  'My brother's good at doing grown-up handwriting,' she added. 'And your brother can hand it in.'

  We had established
, in the course of our conversations, that we both had brothers.

  So that was what we did. I stole a piece of paper and an envelope from the bureau drawer, and Barbara got her older brother Tom to write the note. I tried to persuade Brian that handing a fake sick-note to my teacher was a brave and cunning act, something only a boy's daring could carry through. When this didn't work I pulled rank.

  'You've got to do what I say. I'm older than you.'

  No dice.

  'Then I'll tell Mum and Dad what you've been up to.'

  This was a bluff. I knew of nothing wicked he'd done, I had no interesting inside knowledge of Brian. Not at that stage. But there must have been something he felt shifty about, even then, because he gave in.

  'All right,' he grumbled. 'But it'll cost you a sherbet fountain.'

  I liked that feeling. I liked it that I had bent Brian to my will.

  Barbara and I arranged to meet at the roundabout near the end of our road. I set off for school at the usual time, and then hid in the bushes. It was dark inside but I didn't want anyone else on their way to school to see me. The undergrowth stank sharply of urine. I wasn't sure if it was cat or human in origin. I was afraid of getting my school clothes dirty. I was even more afraid of spiders falling down my neck. It reminded me of my adventure, climbing through the hedge the previous spring. That was Barbara's garden I had peered into. And now here I was, waiting to go on another adventure, with Barbara herself. As my aunt Stella often said, wonders will never cease!

  I waited a long time, crouching in the acrid semi-dark. It occurred to me that perhaps Barbara wouldn't come, hadn't ever meant it, that I'd be stuck there all day. Perhaps she was already in school, sitting up keenly at her desk, reciting something off the board. Perhaps she had tricked me. And Brian might get an attack of nerves at the last minute and fail to hand in my note. Or my teachers would spot the forgery. And then I'd be expelled! The only people who ever got expelled were really wicked boys, boys who were out of everyone's control. Maybe that's how they would see me.