Playing with the Grown-ups

by Sophie Dahl

  'Send Precious to reclaim it, like an enchantress.'

  Her mother started giggling.

  'I wish I'd been there.' she said.

  George did not get a pearl for his birthday brunch. George didn't get much of anything because his birthday was on a Sunday.

  'You have to get him a present,' Sam said in the taxi. Sam was keen on birthdays, and all they entailed, even if they belonged to another.

  'Yeah, Mum, he spent so much money on you for your birthday.' Violet was adamant.

  'It's fine,' her mother said. 'We'll just go to the hardware store. That's open on Sunday.'

  'You can't buy him a present from the hardware store, and we're already an hour late for lunch,' Kitty said.

  'He'll wait,' her mother replied firmly.

  'What is it?' George asked, surveying the rather battered cardboard box in his hand. He looked hungry.

  'It's a clapper, darling. It's so clever. I wish I had one.'

  Her mother ordered a Bloody Mary.

  'What does it do?'

  'You plug it into the wall and when you want to watch television or turn out the lights it does it for you, if you clap.'

  Sam looked pained when she said this.

  'Oh. Great.' George looked like he might burst into tears. Kitty sincerely hoped he wouldn't.

  'Great,' he carried on, 'a birthday break-up clapper. I'm so sorry, guys, I can't stay for lunch, I'll see you soon, I hope.' He ran into the street.

  Marina rolled her eyes at them and followed him slowly; the children watched them fight on the street.

  'That was a worse present than Lily in the box,' Sam said, and Violet and Kitty agreed that indeed it was.

  In the car they fall into the shorthand of family.

  'Is Sambo OK?' Kitty asks. 'What did he say when you told him?'

  'He says that if he doesn't get a first he can blame Mum, so she's provided the perfect excuse; he's been given some sort of special academic dispensation. Has he told you about his girlfriend? She's really sweet, I met her last weekend.'

  'Yes. She quotes Yeats to him as he rows. It's all very Brideshead, lucky old Sam. I spoke to him for an hour on Sunday.' Kitty turns the radio up. 'Do you remember this song from when we were little?' she asks Violet.

  'No. You forget you're much more ancient than me. Why does Sam get to talk to you for an hour at the weekends? You never speak to me for that long.'

  'Violet, I constantly leave you messages and you're either out or you never call me back. Sam is much more routine than you,' Kitty says lightly. 'He also calls me. You never do.'

  'Oh well. I've been busy. I'm having an affair with a deeply unsuitable man. He's old with three children. He directed me in Onegin. Sometimes I take them to the park.'

  She looks at Kitty for a reaction.

  'As long as he's kind to you I don't care how old he is,' Kitty says.

  'What if I told you he was sixty?' Violet asks, taking her eyes off the road.

  'Please concentrate, Violet - you're scaring the shit out of me. Even if he's sixty I don't care as long as he's kind to you. He isn't, is he - sixty, I mean?' she adds with a frown, knowing she's taken the bait.

  'No, he's not. He's thirty-seven. I think I may even be in love. Can you believe it?'

  'Yes. I can,' Kitty says. 'I really have to pee, is there somewhere we can stop?'

  Violet is sweet and quick.

  'Of course. I'm so sorry, why didn't you say before? Your bladder must be like a peanut with lots of baby pushing down on it.'

  Chapter Six

  Mr Fitzgerald, in life so capable and providing, was in death fatally unprepared. He had left the cupboard bare, and they were living on its crumbs. His legacy seemed to be Kitty's smile, and a hole inside of her mother that began slowly eating her inside out like a parasite.

  Marina bought a small house, sight unseen, on the recommendation of an elder at the ashram. 'We're going to live a peaceful life,' she said. 'Fitzgerald's death has made me realise I can't just sit around, doing what I think everyone else wants me to do. I now have to fully embrace my spiritual life, because that is what I truly want. Do you understand?'

  'Yes,' Kitty said. She agreed. She too wanted to lead a spiritual life, one free of cruel girls and unwanted deaths. It sounded lovely. She could concentrate on God and her future Swami-ji sanctioned engagement to Ram.

  'Mummy doesn't want to live here any more,' Kitty told Bestemama on the phone. 'She says it will be better for everyone if we're in the country. I agree. New York is too fast.'

  'Do you want to come back here and live with us?'

  Bestemama asked.

  'I would love it, but I think I should stay here. Mummy needs me.'

  'But what will you do about school, darling?'

  'I'm going to go to school by correspondence.'

  'What does that mean, my love?' Bestemama sounded concerned.

  'The school sends me work in the post and I send it back. It'll be good - no distractions.'

  'Can I talk to her, please?' Bestemama sounded angry.

  'No, she's out buying a carpet.'

  'All this money being spent and wasted. How is she affording all of this?' Bestemarna sounded despairing.

  'Don't worry, she's on a budget, I heard her say so. She's got a gallery, and people want to buy her paintings all the time - they wrote about it in the New York Times.'

  With the furniture in storage, the house on 78th Street was more like a marble mausoleum than ever in the swampy heat. As quickly as it had come, the furniture had gone, and the house looked as though a family had never lived there, save for a naked portrait of Sam that Violet had scrawled in fuchsia on the nursery wall. Kitty found an enormous paddling pool in the basement, still in its box.

  Mr Frazi had charitably offered his house in Southampton for Nora, Sam and Violet during the state of flux. Kitty had her mother to herself for a whole month, and as Marina was without love or distraction, she was starkly present, and apt for fun. Kitty was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of her attention, and went to bed exhausted every night, and like a child from Opportunip Knocks, her mouth ached from smiling and laughing.

  Her mother's bedroom became a sort of designer Bedouin camp. The paddling pool lay, an oasis, in the middle of the flagstone desert. They piled all of the duvets on top of each other and at night lay side by side eating Turkish delight. They played the alphabet game, because the televisions were gone. The alphabet game was a game of insult designed for undesirable men who had betrayed them in some way. The goal of it was to artfully employ each letter of the alphabet creating suitably horrible names for the offender.

  'Let's start with George,' her mother said, trailing a long foot in the paddling pool.

  'No, not nasty enough. Unfair. Noah Redner. Go.'

  'Anus.' Her mother said it slowly, savouring it.

  'Bounder,' Kitty said quickly.

  'Crawling cunt.'

  'Dung fly on a dickhead.'

  'Very good, darling! Egomaniacal extraspecially extraneous egg brain.'

  'Fuckwit.'

  'Shall we check into the Mark tomorrow? I want room service.' Her mother looked at her longingly.

  'Stop cheating. If you win then we can,' Kitty answered.

  'Grinching gonad. Ha.'

  'Kitty, Kitty - our house has legs!' Sam was impressed. 'Legs and woods, woods and legs. I'm going to build a fort, right now. Will you help?'

  She looked at Precious, who was staggering under a mountain of fur coats in the driveway, clearly regretting her offer to help over the weekend.

  'I'll help you build a fort tomorrow, Sambo, OK?'

  The house was at the end of a dirt track, and as well as legs it had a hot tub, and a wet bar. Her mother howled with laughter when she repeated these fixtures to her friends.

  'Mum, the house has "UNIQUE features". That's what the man said. It means the house is worth more money than a normal house. I don't know why you're laughing.' Violet gave Marina a look of chag
rin.

  'I know, you're right, my dearest pound buster. I just never imagined I'd live in a house with a wet bar of all things.'

  'We're having the house blessed by Brahmins and Swami-ji might come.' Her mother was excited, and her hair was an unruly halo. 'Come on, we've got to start cleaning. Precious, Nora, Kitty, we have to make the house like a shrine. We need to clear the sitting room of clutter, because they're going to put a bonfire there, and we'll put lanterns down the drive . . .'

  'What do you mean a bonfire in the sitting room?'

  Nora gave Kitty a look of silent thanks.

  'Not a bonfire in the floor, Kitty. They'll bring a pit with them.'

  Nora looked relieved.

  'I'll make sandwiches,' she said.

  Nora spread tofu butter on spelt bread as Kitty watched. Her mother was now keeping a strict vegan household. The tofu butter didn't want to spread, and Nora stabbed holes that went through the bread on to the kitchen counter.

  'Bloody vegans,' she muttered.

  Kitty went up behind her and wrapped her arms around Nora's waist.

  'When Mummy goes away on Sunday, we can have BLTs for breakfast. I can be vegan during the week, and have a rest on the weekends.'

  Nora looked pleased.

  The house with legs was filled with scarlet and orange, thick with incense and bonfire smoke. All of the female devotees were there, jammed into the sitting room, in special-occasion saris her mother had ordered from the ashram shop. Her mother told Kitty it was to encourage extra blessings, the purchase of material goods for people with less than them, to show that she wasn't attached to her money. Attached or not, she still smiled bashfully when they flocked to Kitty, to tell her what an abundant mother she had.

  Marina braided jasmine in Kitty's hair, and they sat side by side, as the Brahmins threw rice and saffron on the floor in circles around them. Faces taut with kindness, their skin seemed to glow from within.

  She was meant to pray to the gods with her intentions, but she could only pray to one god, because otherwise she thought her prayers would be diluted, and her god had a beard and a white dress, and he sat on a cloud, smoking a pipe like Bestepapa.

  What were her intentions? She wanted to be pure and good. She wanted to be so filled with the spirit that she could not think about food or boys or being tired when she got up at four-thirty to clean the temple. She wanted to be so consumed by God that she was no longer human and did not suffer from human desires. In the lectures, the elders talked about ego. The ego was binding us to the earth, they said, and in order to attain enlightenment, they had to break free from the chains of it. Kitty imagined her ego, a long green horrid viscous thing, rooting her feet down to the hard earth, binding her from flying up to the state of nirvana, weightless and free.

  On a silent retreat, where they could utter no word but this ubiquitous 'OM', she had sat at Swami-ji's feet in the dark of a small round room called the cave for three days. She thought she might go mad in the dark, looking at all of those bowed pious heads, her mother's among them. She looked up at Swami-ji, whose eyes were slits of bliss, and she listened to his 'OM', which was the loudest of all. Its bass resonance hour after hour became another heartbeat, a thought that was chopped in mid fancy flight, until there was nothing but space, and her head was finally still and quiet.

  The Brahmin made them jump over the fire, as the final part of the blessing, and Kitty leapt, feeling the flames whispering at her feet. Everyone clapped and then they had tea.

  Kitty still wasn't sure whether Ram fitted in to being good, even though he was a devotee. People were married in the ashram, but they didn't want to be monks. If only she could banish the thought of his smile, crooked and wide. Or the sweet hay smell of him next to her in the kitchen. He asked her whether he could walk her home, and he took her hand as they walked down the dirt path to her house. Her mother said he could stay and watch a video, and they watched Dirty Dancing, which was the first film she'd watched in months. When Baby lost her virginity to Johnny, Kitty stared straight ahead and said 'OM' in her head a hundred times.

  'Mum, do you think Swami-ji would mind if I had a boyfriend?' she said after she'd waved Ram a chaste goodbye.

  'I don't know. You could ask him. He would probably think you're too young. I certainly have no time for boyfriends at the moment; I'm trying to work on myself. It's so funny, before we moved here, I tried so many things to feel complete, and I felt so lost and confused, and the entire time, without me knowing it, God was inside me waiting to be woken up. Just by being here physically I feel like I'm working out the dharma between Bestemama and Beste-papa. I pray for them, I pray they see God's grace like I have. I do feel loss at Fitzgerald's passing but I don't feel bereft, because I know that we will meet again, and God has a reason for everything. Fitzgerald would be so proud of you, my sweet girl.' Marina drew her close. 'You're a good girl; you know the right thing to do. Trust your instincts.'

  Kitty stopped getting her period, but that was OK because enlightened beings didn't menstruate, that's what they told her mother. Shortly afterwards Marina stopped getting hers too. Kitty was happy. She felt proud of her body's ability to translate the spiritual transformation that was occurring within it.

  'Don't tell Nora,' her mother said. 'She wouldn't understand, she'd be worried.'

  Kitty lived on delicious sugary chai, it made her feel awake, and warm. She couldn't really be bothered to eat much of anything else, because it interfered with the lovely weightless feeling of spirituality. Sam and Violet ate rasmalai and coconut sweets to their hearts' content, and soon mango lass is took the place of Mars Bars for Marina's frequent bribes.

  The lake was close to the house, and by August it was warm from a summer's worth of sun. Her mother woke them before dawn, and they walked along the forest path, which Marina had paid to have landscaped, in their pyjamas, their swimsuits underneath.

  'Listen, the woods are waking up. Can you hear the trees talking to each other?'

  Sam and Violet, holding towels, listened intently.

  'Yes I hear them! They're talking to the birds.' Sam beamed.

  'That one is old and grumpy; he doesn't want to wake up,' Violet said, cocking her head to the sky.

  'Do you see the spider webs? They're not really spider webs; they're hammocks that the fairies sleep in.' Her mother pointed, holding a finger to her lips.

  'Where are the fairies?'

  'They've gone to have their morning bath in the lake. If we're quiet we might see them.'

  They slipped into the water, like thieves of the morning. Her mother lay on her back floating.

  'I'm going to take my swimsuit off,' she said. 'The water feels too blissful not to.'

  'What if someone sees you?' Kitty asked, shocked.

  'No one's going to see me. Why don't you all do it too?'

  Kitty wriggled awkwardly out of hers, and swam it to the bank so she didn't drop it.

  * * *

  Mornings bled into nights. The mantra, for she had finally been entrusted with her own, played like a record on repeat in her head. Was it dawn or dusk that met her as she walked down the dirt track in her sari, on her way to give the statue of Krishna his daily ablutions?

  She did not see Sam and Violet; she did not see her mother. Each of them was entrusted with their own lone spiritual practice, and that was the path with which they trod the summer. Kitty floated on air, garlanded, fully made-up and be jewelled at all times, knowing that this was what she had been born for.

  'Swami-ji asked me whether we were all right financially during Satsang,' her mother said. 'His concern was so loving. I said we didn't have much money left, because of my donations and buying the house, but it didn't matter, now we have the house, and our own expenses here are so low. I said that we were rich with spiritual it yand for the first time in my life I didn't care about material possessions. He smiled and he touched my hand. He told me that God would provide for us.'

  Kitty heard her mother cry some
times, and she did not know whether it was for grief, devotion, or both. She knew that whatever the reason, God would take care of her mother, and all of them. They were his children, and that was what he was meant to do.

  Ram's arm brushed against hers, as they mixed the batter for the dosas.

  Warm and solid, he whispered in her ear, 'Come and meet me in the woods later.'

  'OK,' she said.

  It gave her a pain, this proximity. She felt like her nerves were on fire. What if he wanted to kiss her? Did she have time to go home and brush her teeth first, and rub orange blossom behind her ears? The last time she had done this, it seemed to work. He had told her she smelled like heaven, and asked what scent she was wearing.

  'None,' she had answered. She thought it should be a secret.

  'That's because you're an angel. You smell like that naturally.'

  The woods sang of earth and mystery, and Kitty wondered if she would come upon the ghost of an American Indian. She felt like an interloper, and walked carefully, quietly, so she did not disturb whatever ancient magic went on there at nightfall.

  Ram leaned up against a tree; he held a guitar. A cigarette dangled from his lips.

  'Hey.'

  'Hi.'

  Kitty sat carefully down next to him, arranging her legs. She had a scab on her knee, and she draped her hand casually over it so he wouldn't see it.

  'You want some of this?' he said.

  'I don't smoke.' Her voice sounded prim in the dark.

  'It's a joint.'

  God was testing her. He had put a snake in the body of a handsome boy and he was testing her to see if she was good.

  'I don't do pot either.' Kitty shook her head firmly.

  He laughed.

  'You don't DO pot. You smoke it. That's OK, it's all good.'