Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  This was OK. I could cope with this.

  Later, though, I glimpsed the unmistakable back of his head in one of the shelters on the promenade. He had his arm around a girl with blonde hair. I saw them put their faces together. I saw them kiss. I saw their mouths open wide and their cheeks hollow in the kind of kiss where you eat the other person up. Not loving kisses, not melting kisses. Hard, pushing ones, where you tell the other person what you think of them, what you would like to do to them, given half a chance.

  I see they have taken out the blocks of butter-yellow tulips and the blue forget-me-nots. The gardeners are at work now filling in the earth rectangles with other colours. One is full of busy Lizzies. I think they will be shocking scarlet when they all come out, to judge by the one or two that have opened flowers so far. They seem to have a craze for bright red in their colour schemes here, the colour of brand-new, just-leaked blood. Controversial, I'd say. Another bed is filled with silver-leaved plants, a fluffy silver velvet of the sort Hanny might well have in her wardrobe. I don't think these will ever come into flower; they're planted out for their foliage alone.

  I asked one, of the gardeners what they were called, but he wouldn't tell me. He wouldn't even look at me, but kept his head down and dug away frantically with his trowel.

  I've always thought the gardeners here aren't right in the head.

  I went looking for Hanny. She was on our usual bench. She said, 'I've got a visitor. David's coming to see me this afternoon.'

  I was astonished. It hadn't occurred to me that people visited, like in an ordinary hospital. Or a prison. Here I am, convinced that I've got a fertile imagination, and yet I never thought of this. Turns out I can't imagine further than the end of my nose.

  'I think he's coming to tell me it's over between us.'

  'Why would he do that?'

  Hanny threw her arms out in a wide shrug. Today she was wearing an ice-blue mohair sweater, with long sleeves that she tucked over her knuckles to keep warm. Even in the summer sunshine she felt cold. 'Why not?'

  I was still wrestling with the idea of a visitor, someone from Out There coming to see someone In Here. I suppose it could be said that sometimes I don't listen properly, either. But I tried to pay attention to her.

  'I mean, what have we got going for us?' she went on. 'Me banged up like this for months. Him out in the real world. He probably wants a nice, proper girlfriend. One who likes him, for a start.' She laughed her husky humourless laugh, the one she saved for when she was staring straight ahead at nothing.

  'He might not. He might just be coming to see you. See how you are.'

  'Doubt it. No, he's come to finish with me. I can feel it in my bones. And I've got very sensitive bones, believe me.' She shivered and folded the spare volume of the sweater round her ribs.

  I asked her, 'Will you be upset if he does?'

  She turned to look at me. 'Why would I be upset?' Her stare was as bold and baleful as Mandy's. 'I told you, David was my mother's idea all along. Not mine. David's just a passport to make me look OK. In the real world.'

  'Right. I get it.' I didn't know if I believed her. She sounded pretty upset to me.

  'And we're not in the real world, are we, here? And we're not OK.'

  Suddenly she laughed her brisk cheerful laugh, the one I thought was genuine.

  'Don't tell me you thought we were OK!?'

  She laughed so hard she threatened to fall off the seat.

  When I saw her next day, I asked Hanny, 'What did he say?'

  She looked at me blankly. 'What did who say?'

  'David.'

  'Oh.' She turned away, pulling her sleeves down over her hands, kicking at a fallen flower on the path. 'He didn't say anything. He never turned up.'

  'What, not at all? No message, nothing?'

  'Nn-nn.' She kicked with her other foot. The toe of her cowboy boot was scuffed.

  'What happened, do you think?'

  She shook her head. 'He chickened out.'

  Hanny didn't seem at all bothered. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe he never existed at all. Maybe she just made him up.

  29

  Party

  It's my birthday today. My nineteenth birthday. Gemini. The Twins. I can just picture the sign for Gemini, from one of Barbara's magazines: two identical figures sitting, knees up, back to back. Looking out in opposite directions. Not speaking to each other.

  My birthday passes as spectacularly as every other birthday. Nobody sends me a card.

  In Activity I made a birthday cake out of my clay and rolled a birthday candle and stuck it on the top.

  'What's that?' Hanny said to me, and I said, 'A penguin,' and she said, 'It's not very good.'

  Patrick and Tillie were having a party. A big party to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and her fortieth birthday, the dates of which were close together.

  We didn't celebrate birthdays much in our house. Maybe it was the adoption thing, I concluded later. Maybe our dates of birth, birth to some unknown woman, somewhere in the world, were not important, were ludicrous to celebrate in that family. At the time I only thought that birthdays were low-key, having little experience of anyone else's. A card or two, a single present, wrapped, beside the breakfast plate, mumbled good wishes in the morning and then get on with the rest of the day as if it were any other. No cakes, no candles, no parties, no balloons.

  So Tillie was forty. I was surprised. She didn't look it. She looked girlish, and like the Tillie of twenty in the paintings of her. Though now I thought about it, the skin around her eyes was dry and papery, a faint dove-grey. There were fine lines etched all over the backs of her hands as if, when she drew them from the washing-up water and dried them, the elastic sheen of youth was gone. She moved like a girl, and squinted and stuffed the hair behind her ears like a girl, but maybe she wasn't quite so youthful after all. How could I compare?

  Stella was thirty-nine. I knew because Mandy had told me. Mandy was good for this kind of information. Bettina was thirty-one and Stella thirty-nine. My father was six years older, making him forty-five, and Gloria was somewhere in between. And who knows how old my mother was? This was a secret she felt it only dignified to keep, like keeping the size of her bust from prurient shop assistants. If Stella was thirty-nine and Tillie forty, which one looked the younger? It was hard to tell if Stella looked older or just like a member of a completely different species. Her powdered cheeks were rough peach-skin, her pierced earlobes creased down the middle, her bosom had a deep declivity Tillie could never hope to achieve. Yet Tillie had six children and Stella none. Perhaps it was true what Gloria sometimes claimed (though not on her own behalf, of course): children are supposed to keep you young.

  'They're having a party? I'm staying over that night with a friend,' Barbara announced.

  'How do you know it's that night?' asked Isolde.

  'Because I'm just about to get myself invited,' Barbara called back, tearing down the stairs towards the telephone.

  'If they're having a party, I'm staying here,' Isolde said darkly. 'To keep an eye on things.'

  'Good,' said Tom. 'A party. Good.'

  I knew, in the part of my soul that was Caroline Clipper, that a party was bad news. My mum and dad would peer out of the windows at cars coming down the street, and express their dismay at the number. They would tune their ears to any hint of noise, and worry and fret all evening, speculating on the exact nature of the event next door. There would be drinking, there would be revelry. It was summer and people would be bound to drift outside, windows would be thrown open. I didn't know anything about parties.

  'What are you going to wear?' Tillie asked me, all excited.

  'Am I invited?' I asked.

  'Of course you're invited.'

  In the event we hid upstairs.

  Isolde, in a purple satin shift dress with a V-neck and a neatly darted waist, made it her job to wander round offering big plates of food. Tillie and her mother had made canapés, tiny mouthful
s of things, strange and mouth-watering and delicious. I was afraid to count how many foodstuffs I could not identify. Isolde drifted about, elegant and at ease. I could hear her voice: sing-song, chit-chat. It reminded me of the time I'd overheard Barbara talking with our piano teacher. Where did they learn this social competence? (Actually, I knew. It came in the package, it came with the deal: in the genes and as part of the upbringing. Nature and nurture. Wouldn't you bloody know it?) Mattie and Sebastian circulated, spoilt and feted – or studiously avoided, according to inclination – by the guests, until they fell asleep in corners and were carried out of the way.

  The nerve centre of the party was the kitchen, where most of the guests seemed to gather. It was from here, in the big double oven, that the baking trays of delicacies emerged. More, and different kinds, appeared from the old head-high fridge. Mrs Van Hoog swam back and forth through the crowd, taking a slow crawl to the sink for clean glasses, pushing with an onerous breaststroke back to the oven with yet another empty platter. The crowds parted only with greatest reluctance, hauling in the small of their backs, tucking their elbows away to give her an inch or two, glancing over their shoulders at her as if she was the hired help. Maybe they believed she was. She had on her sky-blue pinafore, and the hair pinned into her bun was escaping in sweaty curls. She kept her mouth firmly shut. Her expression was inscrutable. If she had been the hired help I would have guessed her politics were fiercely left-wing and she despised these lightweight revellers but did the work anyway and spent her wages on dynamite for others to blow them up. But she was Tillie's mother, the famously soft and spoiling Oma, endlessly prising open the children's mouths to tuck sweet cakes inside. She would do anything for Tillie. She would feed the five thousand, and wash the food down with drink until it swilled out of their gills again.

  And there was enough drink for the five thousand. I had never seen so much all in one place, not even in an off-licence (and the only time I went in one of those was to buy a bag of crisps). It stood on all the surfaces, together with glasses tall and short, delicate or free-with-petrol tough. There were bottles of wine, and bottles of spirits in more shapes than I knew bottles came in, and brown beer bottles, and fat beer cans, and Patrick already had a barrel wedged outside on the veranda where people could just come and turn the beer on like a tap. And Tillie, or her mother, had made a drink called a wine cup, in a huge glass bowl swimming with slices of orange and apple and waterlogged brown banana, and even with petals from garden flowers. I was surprised anyone wanted to drink it, but it was going down fast, and every so often Patrick would seize the nearest bottle and pour generous quantities in.

  So this was how you held a party.

  I took myself to the kitchen, imagining I could be like Isolde and justify my presence by helping out. But Tillie found me nothing to do, kept whirling past me as if I was invisible. I picked up a plate and she whisked it out of my hands, and then turned, got grabbed and kissed on the cheek by someone, fell into animated conversation, and quite forgot about the plate. I was squeezed between the edge of the kitchen table and the bodies of yelling strangers who kept backing into me and stepping on my feet without even noticing. I knew no one, could talk to no one, had nothing to eat and no glass in my hand. I was a party failure.

  Tom's chin came over my shoulder and rested there, painfully. 'Come on,' he said, 'this is no place for the likes of us.' His arms came round my ribs and he joined his hands together at the front. He stood up straight again, removing his chin, but kept his hands where they were. 'Too many arty farts. Too many Oooh hallooo, how nice to see yooo-s.' It made me laugh: this was just what Tillie's grabber had said. Tom backed me out through the door, along the hall, and then posted me ahead of him up the stairs. I was sad to lose his hold on me. His lanky arms around my ribs were more intimate than any of those kisses had been.

  Tom and Tom Rose and I sat upstairs on the floor of Tom's room. We could feel the music vibrating through the floorboards under our thighs, thrumming up our backbones, buzzing in our skulls. The dog, which had been confined to Tom's room to keep him out of the way, sat tensely beside us. Even he looked headachy and confused.

  Tom had brought up a plate of food and a big can of bitter. Tom Rose made two holes in it with the can opener that was a fixture of Tom's bedside table, and attempted to drink straight from the can. 'Oh, waste!' Tom shouted, as it slid down his chin, neck and shirt. He found three glasses, misty, and probably used many times without benefit of a wash, in the detritus on top of his chest of drawers. He poured, also missing. The huge can was hard to manoeuvre. 'Oh, waste!' Tom Rose said, in his deeper voice, enjoying himself. 'No matter,' said Tom. 'Lots more where that came from.'

  'Certainly is,' Tom Rose said, sitting back against the side of the bed, belching, deeply satisfied.

  We heard the cackling laughter of people below on the front veranda, the shouted greetings when another car drew up. 'Nowhere to bloody park!' I heard a man call. 'Haven't you roped off a neighbouring field, Hennessy?' His voice assumed a honking, barking edge. 'I say, haven't you roped off one of your fields? The old hundred-acre would do.' I thought of my mother and father, twitching at the net curtains, horrified. I was horrified too.

  The beer was warm and tasted of electroplated spoons. I drank it down like water. The more of it you had, the less you tended to react with a shudder.

  Tom had turned his own record player on, was competing with some deeply thrumming music, jangling electric guitars and a synthesizer that seemed to be playing some other song entirely. The words sounded like 'Wait, wait, wait, why do-on't you-ou wait?' I didn't share his taste in music, I didn't seem to have any taste in music of my own yet, so I just tipped back my head and mouthed along as if I knew the words: 'Wait, wait, wait ...'

  'Why-hy do-on't you-ou wait!?' Tom and Tom Rose wailed, screwing up their faces, leaning their heads towards one another.

  When that side of the record had finished Tom Rose turned it over and Tom scrambled up and loped off downstairs for more drink. While he was gone Tom Rose made no attempt to talk to me or even look at me. He could have been alone in the room. His foot thumped up and down on the floor in time to the music. Tom was some time. He came back with four bottles of beer and a clear glass bottle half full of gin.

  I tried the gin, an inch in the bottom of my beer glass. That really made me shudder and gag. It looked so innocuous, watery, sliding around like glycerine. Tom took my glass and went to the window, tipping it over the veranda roof below. 'It's raining gin,' he called down. 'Just look up and stick your tongues out!'

  I didn't bother to drink any more. I went to the bathroom and swilled my mouth with tap water and a dab of toothpaste. I had to queue behind three other people before I could get in.

  When I came back, Tom Rose was looking at his watch. 'I have to go soon,' he said. I had to go too, but I always felt an idiot for saying so. In fact I should have gone long before, but that was too foolish to admit to.

  Where did my parents think I was? At my friend's, up the road. I was hazy as to exactly which friend, which house. I let them fall into believing it was the new girl, the plump girl with the long single plait down her back, who had moved into the bungalow nearest the roundabout. She went to my school – at least, we saw her in the uniform – and she was about my height. I didn't even know her name, though I had christened her Rosemary and kept it in store, just in case they should ask. I gave the impression we did our homework together, that is, I went off with books under my arm, without actually putting the notion into words. You couldn't even say that I had actually lied this time ... my friend, down the road ... well, here I was. It just wasn't that inert-looking girl with the pink-framed spectacles. It was Tom, lanky and lecherous. And Tom Rose, the inner parts of whose mouth I knew well, though he wouldn't even speak to me.

  'But it's just getting good,' said Tom. 'Look, look, something special.' And he got out a tobacco tin, just like his mother's, with a scratched, intricate pattern of leaves on top, an
d opened it. Inside, amongst shreds of tobacco, was a long twisted white paper cigarette, very inexpert-looking. It reminded me more of a Tampax than one of Tillie's little roll-ups, which were match-sized and match-thin.

  'Now, this ...' Tom said, stretching out comfortably on the floor, 'is our party.'

  We passed it from mouth to mouth. It was no good my saying I didn't smoke. Hadn't smoked at all, really, not since the hot worm in my throat on the veranda years before. At school girls smoked Number Six with a Polo mint in their mouths, the cheap version of menthol cigarettes. I usually accepted the Polo mint and didn't bother with the rest.

  'Be a good girl,' Tom said, confidentially, winking like some old uncle. 'Don't be a drag.'

  'Well, do be a drag,' said Tom Rose, laughing lazily, issuing a white layer of smoke out of his mouth, like some mountain mist, heavy and rolling, 'do take a drag.'

  The beer, the gin, the toothpaste, the unfamiliar food, were curling around in my stomach like some restless animal trying to settle itself. The smoke flowed in and around, the smell of it was inside the channels of my head and around me, outside. I gritted my teeth, determined to hold on to my integrity, my stomach contents. I got up slowly, a bit unsteady. 'I've really got to go. I'm dead late.'

  'Mr Clipper will wonder where you are. Mrs Clipper will be distraught,' Tom said, and they both laughed. Laughed inordinately, lying flat on the floor with only their heads tipped up at a painful angle, rested against the bed. I could see Tom's bony ribs heaving up and down under his rucked-up T-shirt. I stepped over Tom Rose's legs and went out.

  The stairs were a problem, see-sawing away into the distance, terribly long and steep. I held on to the banister rail with one hand and the wall with the other, and levered myself down, like a person on crutches. I had to push past a woman in a silver dress who was sitting on the stairs, jabbering into the telephone, and a man and a woman who were embracing. As I squeezed past I had to put both my arms around the man's back to steady them and myself.