'That's not funny,' Mike said.
But Hanny let him have both barrels anyway, right in the guts.
We aren't allowed to go into each other's rooms here, though I've often walked slowly past the open doorway of Hanny's. She's got the same blue-checked bedcover and curtains as me; some people have green. On the wall-shelf she has arranged a photo gallery. Her parents, grandparents, numerous cousins and uncles and aunts, the family cat, her grandmother's cairn terriers, all in silver frames. They watch her push the food around her plate and practise sleight-of-hand with her sleeves.
I've got no such thing. Our family were not much given to photography, and they weren't that keen on displaying the results. In Gloria's house the only ones I remember were a touching picture of her and Eddy on their wedding day, and two posed studio portraits of her long-dead mother and father hanging above the sideboard in the front room. Taken in their early twenties, when they were engaged but not yet married, they faced each other, looking lugubrious and far from young. Sometimes, if she was doing the dusting or putting away knives and forks in the cutlery drawer of the sideboard, Gloria would chat to them: 'All right, Mum? All right, Dad?'
'You can't ignore them,' she told me, quite seriously. 'It wouldn't be polite.'
At home the only photos on display were of Brian and me, aged seven and eight, in what must have been our peak year as satisfactory offspring, taken by the school photographer against a sky-blue backdrop. Both of us in neat uniforms, my hair not yet long enough for bunches, Brian's wet-combed across his chubby forehead. They stood for years on top of the piano, not looking down on me as I practised but gazing away across the room, as if desisting from comment. All the other family photos were kept in a single album, hard to fill, with snaps of us in front of stately homes or picnicking in windy fields on our days out. A few of Bettina's wedding, and an old one of Stella, Gloria and Eddy in deckchairs, with the big clock on the prom recognizable behind them. Maybe Wally, or another of Stella's unpromising beaux, took this snap, crouching down with the Kodak and instructing them all to say 'Cheese!' The rest of our annual school photos were tucked inside the back cover. There were no pictures of us as babies (of course) or of Mum and Dad in that blank time before we arrived.
The Hennessys went in for paintings, not photographs. But I had one record of Tom, taken in the automatic photo booth that Woolworth's installed after they ripped out the old tea bar. One day when we had nothing better to do, Tom and I crammed inside and posted our coins. We squashed our faces together and arranged our expressions in the mirror, waiting for the flashes to start. After the fun Tom could barely be bothered to wait for the results to drop through the slot. 'We'll look like gibbering idiots,' he said, leaning against the booth with his arms folded aggressively, putting off any other potential customers.
I waited, and I picked up the strip of four tiny photos. In one Tom was grinning like a death's-head. My eyes were huge with the flash, except for the last one where they were screwed up, laughing. I didn't keep that one, or the death's-head. I snipped them up, but carefully scissored between the remaining two, and gave one of them to Tom. I don't know what he did with it. In mine Tom just looked like a pale and ugly boy with a bad perm. But it was the nearest thing I had to a picture of my love.
Every summer Brian went to Scout camp. Stayed for a week in a damp tent with five other smelly-footed boys. One year I said to Mum, 'I'm sleeping in his room while he's away. It's OK. I checked with him and he said yes.'
Of course I hadn't checked with him. He wouldn't have approved. Very jealous of his territory, was Brian. As if he had something to hide.
So for a week I slept in the built-in bed up near the stars. The ceiling sloping over me felt strange. Even in the darkness I could feel it there. I was aware of myself up high, like on the deck of some old-fashioned ship, a vessel of exploration, the Pinta or the Santa Maria. Breasting into the waves with me dozing at the helm, out on the bowsprit, up in the crow's nest. It was away from every other room, every entanglement and obligation in the house. You could breathe. No wonder Brian liked it up here. He never had to sleep downstairs in the belly of the house, like a slave in a slave-ship. I left the windows open so that the smell of the night could drift around me, and I heard the night sounds come in. You couldn't hear that kind of thing from my room. The bird hoot, the fox yell, and sometimes the wonderful sound, like a powerful zip unzipping, of a motorbike engine tearing away up the main road.
Bikers hung out at the café by the roundabout. During the day it was family time, trippers welcome – bring the kiddies in, madam, plenty of room! But in the evening, motorbike boys assembled in the forecourt, swaggering round, gunning their engines, shouting out in rough voices. And Mandy had been seen there, on the forecourt, hanging out with greasy bikers. It was Suzannah Grey who told me, when we were in our last year at school.
'That Mandy Burton – she's your cousin?' she said, stopping abruptly in front of me in the corridor one day.
'Sort of cousin. Distant cousin.'
'What's she like?'
This was a fatal question to be asked at school; a cryptic question. You could never be sure if the person asking was a sworn enemy or a bosom friend of the person being asked about. The only thing you could be sure of was that they had some good and as yet hidden reason for asking. I took the politic way out and gave the smallest shrug.
'Does she go with greasers?'
'I don't know.'
'You know the transport café by the roundabout?'
I nodded.
'Saw her there, getting on the back of some dirty great motorbike. Bloke looked about forty. How old is she?'
That was the reason, then, the delight of scandal and gossip, the satisfaction of rubbishing someone's reputation in front of their kith and kin. Publicly, in a corridor seething with other girls. I wasn't quick enough to think of asking how Suzannah saw her, what Suzannah was doing in the vicinity. My best retorts are only ever in my head.
So Mandy had felt the call in her blood of her poor dead motorcycle-riding father. I could see her there, in my mind's eye, all too easily. Pinched white face under the brilliant lights, gum-chewing jaw hard at work, bump-and-grind hip jutting out, bantering with bikers. Great big bulky men in studded waistcoats and fingerless gloves, with ratty beards and stubbly jowls. Dirty hands and black-rimmed nails. She had found her niche, her true home. God knows what they made of her. Skinny mascot doll to dangle from their handlebars? Baby delinquent in need of a good fright, or a firm hand? Maybe they just took her home to her mum. They say there's honour among thieves.
Not that there was any among the ones I knew.
I didn't mean to waste time thinking about Mandy while I was up there in Brian's room. I meant only to sleep, afloat, try it out, while I could.
When he came back from camp he was angry with me. I didn't tell him anything, but I think Mum must have let something slip, mentioned it in passing – 'Oh, that was very kind of you, Brian, letting your sister borrow your room. Not that I can think why she'd want to.' And he was furious! But he showed his fury in sly, cold ways. He trod heavily round the house for days, not attempting to speak to me unless it was necessary. He'd pass the salt when asked, but leave it just outside my reach. He'd turn out the light if he left a room and I was still in it. He never said anything about it at all. He never accused me of taking his room, sleeping in his bed, trampling all over his territory. Maybe Mum didn't tell him, didn't need to. Maybe some animal sense of his picked up the wrong smell, the rumpled rug, the footprint discernible only to the most intense and spiritual of native trackers. After all, the sheets had been changed. And I'd aired the room quite thoroughly with those wide-flung windows.
The other thing that he did was take my latest book, one I was borrowing from the Hennessys, and burn it to a little heap of ashes in the wire incinerator down beside our garden shed. I didn't see him do it. But I couldn't find the book, not on my bookshelf, under the bed, or even in Tom's or Barbara's
room where I might well have left it. I didn't like to ask anyone if they had seen it. But I'd gone out to unpeg the washing for Mum – see, I was still biddable, in small house-trained ways – and I spotted something in the incinerator. I looked more closely: a new pile of ashes and a triangle, an inch wide and two inches across, of dun cloth-covered board with a minute gold line just inside the rim. I knew exactly what it was. No one should burn books. No one should burn anything as blameless as Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer. But Brian had.
And after that he was back to normal. Back to usual, I should say.
Sometimes I look about me at the people in here and wonder if they were ever normal. If they ever, at one time in their life, walked down a street or round a playground without anybody staring at them, whispering, pointing them out. Maybe they were ordinary people, once. Perhaps they had friends, real, normal friends, not just someone whose mother had insisted they be friendly, out of pity's sake. Not just some aunt or cousin, acting as a surrogate friend, because there wasn't – never would be – anyone else, not from choice. God, I wonder if any of them were married, once, on the outside? Were loved and cherished and desired, had someone whose face lit up when they walked into the room? Someone who longed for them. I wonder if any of them had children of their own?
I wonder if they remember?
Actually, it's hard to imagine it. It's even hard to imagine Mike, or Trudy, or Lorna, for that matter, finding anyone weird enough to want them, fancy them, yearn for them from afar. Hanny and I are definitely the only two normal people in this place.
Oh, and there's Dr Travis. I can imagine him with a mum and a dad, I can see him in a pleasant family setting. I can see him having dinner with his girlfriend at a restaurant table, snow-white linen and gleaming china. I can imagine them raising their glasses to each other over the small vase of carnations that sits between them. I can see the pair of them quite clearly. The funny thing is, in my mind's eye, she looks a bit sort of Carolyn-like.
'You haven't been ...' Lorna says, pausing on the word dramatically. I don't admire her technique. She's chosen the wrong sort of word to emphasize. Far better a noun, or a decent verb, something more specific. I wait for the rest. '... very creative in Group, Cora.'
Oh, my mistake. I thought it was Activity that we were supposed to be creative in. I thought it was there that we gave ourselves up to the sordid secret shapes in our minds and let them take substance through our fingertips. Once at school I got given a C-minus for a composition, and the remark was added (in red ink): 'You must show more imagination!' Since the title set for the composition was 'A Day in the Life of a Penny', I think I would have been justified in replying the same. Why should we produce more than our superiors are capable of coaxing out of us? I wouldn't mind if my clay penguins or my snowmen were judged and found wanting. Lorna must know by now that manual dexterity is not one of my strongest points. Though, in mitigation, perhaps she's not been a party to most of the discussion around that subject.
Does this mean that they all report back to Lorna? I hate to think so, to think of Mike and Moira and Trudy observing my every word, my every significant silence, and telling tales. I try not to think about that side of it at all – what the point of all this stuff is.
'You do not – apparently – play a very full part in Group.' She pauses to stare at me from under her thick pony's fringe. 'You don't say much, you don't cooperate. And you don't say much to me, either.' She pauses again. This must be the technique for the day. Well, it's one I'm good at, too.
'Yet I would have thought you'd find it easy. To say something. Anything. Anything that comes into your head. You can be very articulate when you want to be, and I thought you were good at making things up. That's something you are good at, Cora.'
All this comes with huge pauses in between. During which I look at the dreary painting on the wall. Or I look at my hands, at my fingernails rimmed with clay. As if this time it is I who have clawed my way through earth and rocks.
'Do you bite your nails, Cora?' she says, following my gaze, changing tack. Being wickedly cunning, so she thinks. And Dr Travis jerks into life to write this down.
Do you bite your nails? Have you got a bike? How high can you jump? Can you do this? Can you?
'I have it on good authority ...' (Oh yes? Whose?) '... that you like to make things up. Do you like to tell stories in your head?'
She leans back and folds her arms. Today she is wearing the blouse with the necktie made out of the same material. As she folds her arms the tie loops out like an enormous single bosom.
I don't make things up. I just see things – what they are, what they could be. If anything, I see too much, too clearly. That's what they don't like.
She tries again, a new direction. I am getting so tired of this. 'Do you have a temper, Cora? Would you say you had a quick temper? Do you sometimes react violently, before you've had time to think?'
'No, I haven't,' I reply, just to surprise her. Just to keep her on her toes. 'I'm easy-going,' I add, and to prove it I give her a happy little shrug. An easy-going kind of shrug. You're not annoying me with this line of questioning, you're not trying my quick-erupting temper, that little shrug says.
'You know, it would be much better,' says Lorna, rather sternly, as if she is a headmistress and I am the harum-scarum madcap of the fourth form, 'if you could try to be more active in Group. Don't hide your light under a bushel, Cora. Will you think about that? Will you give it some serious thought?'
I nod. Serious thought is something I'm always ready for. In fact, try and stop me.
Lorna gathers herself and I think we've finished, but there is something else: 'You've led us a merry dance, you know, and so far we've let you. Merry dances are always worth watching. But don't think I don't know what you're up to.'
And Dr Travis gives her a sharp look. A quick flick of a look before returning to his notebook, in which he is now writing nothing. But a look all the same. I saw it. Nothing passes me by.
So I try. I really try.
It's Trudy's turn to run Group. She doesn't look well. She pulled the short straw today, and she really doesn't look at all well. I wonder if it's her period? I wonder if it's her time of life? I've no idea how old she is – it's difficult to tell with very fat people – and she has a permanently cross expression, which may be there because she is permanently cross, tugging all that bulk around with her, or it may be just the weight of her flesh that pulls her facial muscles into a scowl. I hate fat people. And I hate short people, like Lorna, like Moira, a minute ferocious doll of a woman, and I hate thin people – no, that's not true – but I hate gawky people like Mike. They really aren't physically blessed, the people here. It's no beauty contest. I bet Moira went round with the straws, up there in the staffroom, and arranged it so that poor fat wheezing Trudy would get suckered. Because nobody else feels like doing it, for God's sake, and Trudy should pull her enormous weight.
We sit in the usual circle and Trudy decides that we'll play a new game. Picture postcard, it is called. Remember somewhere you've been, something interesting you've seen. Let the image pop into your mind just like a picture postcard. Tell us about it.
Fair enough.
I remember Tillie slamming down a lump of pastry on the table. Not on the marble pastry board (a marvel, this, white and cloudy grey and black, swirled through like a monochrome version of Raspberry Ripple ice cream). I don't remember why, just her tight lipless mouth, and her hand over the slamming pastry. And the way all the plates jumped on the table top.
But the Old Crone has taken the stage and is yattering on about something, a man and a car and a policeman, and everyone else has to wait.
I remember Tillie saying, 'Oh, there you are, my little doves,' and 'Let me in,' and kneeling up on the bed, her own bed, while we tugged at the pillows and shuffled ourselves over. She switched on the white lamp above her head and Barbara said, 'Oh, Muh-um! It gets reflected in the screen. We can't see a thing now!' And Tillie turned it
off.
It always disconcerted me to hear them call her Mum. To assert that connection, that umbilical claim.
It used to disconcert me at first when I heard them refer to her as Tillie and call her it to her face. As far as I knew, mothers didn't operate in the realm of Christian names – they forfeited those at the moment of giving birth. It seemed to trespass on the boundaries between adults and children, tipping everything sideways, to go flashing Tillie's Christian name about, using it as if they were equals. The grown-ups whose first names I was permitted to use were supposed to be strictly prefixed with 'Aunt' and 'Uncle'. Even Bettina was referred to as 'Dad's Cousin', and Mandy as 'Your Cousin'.
Oh, there I go again. Drifted away from the postcard, away from the game. Must try harder, pay proper attention. Wet Lettuce is lisping faintly about some incident fossilized in her past, and Trudy lies there, beached, in her orange-upholstered easy chair, eyelids half closed. Even if I came up with something creative, chances are she wouldn't recall it by the time she gets debriefed.
Here's an image that keeps popping into my mind, bright as a picture postcard: a sunny day; our street is jammed with fire engines, and I can see Barbara running, with a dress like an old-fashioned bride's yanked up above her knees, and her feet bare on the bumpy tarmac. She's running like mad towards her house.
41
Desperate
These are the kind of questions that Lorna asks me. She is getting hard, and desperate.
– Tell me more about when you and your brother used to play together as children. Who tended to choose the game? Was one of you naturally the leader?
– Did you keep secrets from each other, or did you like to tell everything?
– What about if there was a disagreement with the other children? Would Brian stand up for you? Or did you, as big sister, tend to protect him?
– Who would you say got on best with your mother, your adoptive mother?
– Would you say you were closer to any of your aunts? Was there anyone you thought you might have preferred as a mother?
Living In Perhaps Page 28