My brother and I competed for her elegant smiles, her coochy-coos, her naked body. We knew every mark on her. We knew her like a weatherman knows his isobars, like a beaver knows its twigs. When George walked into the room we clung on to Jean as if she was a ship and George was a storm. Poor George. He had started to smoke a pipe and sucked his way through our first year.
As soon as each child could walk we were handed a bottle and sent from our mother’s bedroom to a room at the end of an immense corridor. The room was called the Furthest Nursery. The journey took several hours. I remember stumbling into cupboards and dangling from crooked banisters trying to find my way. When I eventually got there Frank was waiting. The room was large and white with expectant toys sitting on painted shelves.
Once the door was closed we were sealed off from the rest of the house. It was in this room that Frank bent my pliant limbs, and it was here that I coached my army of one-legged, shaven dolls. It might as well have been a forest outside the door, as we rarely went out. Sometimes Jean brought us meals on a tray, or appeared with clean clothes and ushered us downstairs to meet a relative or a neighbour before sending us back up again.
At moments like these I clung to her legs and screamed for mercy. I even bit her long white fingers. She never smacked me. I remember long hours in a playpen. I think some grandparents were there. I saw a wrinkled tongue and some creased up eyes shaking a rattle in front of me. When you’re wailing everything else is very quiet. I grew to like the sound of hoovers.
The house was complicated and difficult to clean. It was full of unnecessary space; box rooms and ante-rooms and sheds, sculleries and parlours. It was designed by Georgian midgets. Jean, defeated by its nooks, hired a cleaner called Carmen who wielded a dangerous brush and had horsy black hair. Her arms bulged out from the sleeves of her blouse, and she had large and potent breasts that Frank and I tried to recreate with cushions. She brought us treats wrapped in newspaper that looked like sweets swept up from a factory floor. Then she would put on a pinafore with flaming summer flowers printed all over it, and strap cricket pads to both her knees. After that we left her alone. Carmen did not like to be spoken to while she was cleaning. If we crept past, backs pressed to the wall to avoid her damp, heaving back, she scowled at us, and even swiped at our ankles with her yellow chamois leather. George lurked around her with interest, but I never saw her speak to him. She sang operatically into her bucket, and polished everything until it gasped with exhaustion and gleamed with fear. Her rumbling arms could be heard from the bilious depths of the house. When she had gone her presence continued to resound throughout the hallways.
We grew steadily on iron tablets and spoonfuls of cod liver oil. We were difficult to catch and wouldn’t come downstairs to have our photographs taken. We were busy frightening each other; making poisonous pastes from Vim and mustard, or playing unhappy families with the one-legged dolls. Frank lit Bunsen burners and fried crystals with my dolls’ cookery set. The room was acrid with burnt plastic, and tortured teddies. Downstairs Jean was redecorating the dining room, or folding pale green napkins into doves’ tails. Meanwhile, George gravitated to the only room in the house with a high ceiling, which was a tall parlour with small anxious windows, where he looked down ruefully at sheets of blotting paper, or drew diagrams of tiny vermicelli wires on graph paper. If we cascaded down the stairs in search of string or sharp needles, toasting forks or live wood lice, Jean put her thin finger to her soft lips and told us that he was busy. I would peek through the keyhole and see him sitting by a fire, looking helplessly at lengths of rope in his hands, and twisting them into knots, his big forehead wincing and furrowing with the effort, his pitted cheeks lit up by the fire. He looked like an exhibit in a waxwork museum.
We only saw him at breakfast.
Each morning George boiled an egg with scientific precision, as if he were conducting an experiment. First he punctured the egg with a sterilized needle, then he lowered it slowly into boiling water on a silver spoon. He turned the egg-timer upside down and watched it intently as the water bubbled. Then when the egg was cooked he placed it in a heavy china egg cup and sliced its top off with one blow of his Egg Knife, spooning the contents into his mouth in less than three shovels. Then, when the egg was scraped clean we would squeak, ‘Daddy, look at the bird on the fence!’ and obediently he would look up with exaggerated surprise, while one of us turned the eggshell upside down in the egg cup.
‘Daddy, here’s your second egg!’ we chorused.
He guffawed then, and roared ‘A second egg! How kind you are!’ and crashed his shining teaspoon down on the empty shell that shattered into tiny fragments.
Then he pretended to cry in desperate, grieving sobs, and we watched him, horrified and open-mouthed.
The theatrical nature of our lives was enhanced by a mysterious line of people that drifted past the front door, looking vaguely confused, watching our house as if it was under glass. I thought perhaps they had heard about my beautiful mother, and had come to see for themselves, but one day George took me outside and lifted me high up on his bony shoulders and showed me the plaque that was fixed above our front door: IN THIS HOUSE HARRIET SMILES LIVED AND DIED 1821-1870.
‘She wrote poetry books,’ he said, turning to nod at a group of Japanese scholars, who stared back at us through photographic lenses.
Our lives were acted out in front of this perpetual audience who peered through the windows holding heavy cameras and binoculars, pressing their faces to the glass with their hands cupping out the light.
They saw George, bent over strands of rope, knotting the days away, and if they stepped back and craned to see into higher windows they might catch a mirror reflection of Jean, dabbing her ears with Tweed, lying on her wide bed, mentally calculating the worth of her silver knives and forks, ignoring the faint stench of burning plastic drifting up the stairs, fearing that all the money would be spent and she must eat cabbage and brown paper again.
Like monkeys in a zoo we became accustomed to being stared at, but their stares did not really see us. We were just shadows flitting behind the thick glass windows. My shadow inhabits photograph albums all over the world. I still worry about that; that bits of me are caught behind cellophane in other people’s living rooms.
Someone To Look After Me
My last relationship was with a linguist called Barbara. I met her in Paradise, a women’s bar behind the bus station. She was wearing a low-cut dress with several straps that left indented marks on her clavicles. Her lipstick was smudged, and her eyebrows were plucked into an expression of continual shock. She looked out of place in Paradise because everyone else had short barber’s haircuts and wore denim shirts, or vests, or jackets with the collars turned up (apart from the occasional huddled group in the corner wearing bobble hats, stripy scarves and donkey jackets who had come from an animal rights meeting). Barbara was very feminine and had no idea how to swagger.
I bought her a gin and tonic. We were both alone and reading novels, which initially made conversation easy. After we had looked at each other’s books, however, we were both plunged into bleak embarrassment, unable to return to our reading or look one another in the eye. I looked at my hands, which are both wide and bony and Barbara said, ‘That’s a nice ring. Is it an antique?’
It was my aunt’s,’ I said, then, ‘are you meeting somebody?’
‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m new.’
New to what, I thought.
‘I haven’t told my mother. How do you really know that you’re...?’ Barbara leant towards me, her dress gaping.
‘Ages. Since I first saw Dusty Springfield.’
We looked around the bar room together. There were PE teachers and headmistresses and lawyers and beach guards. There were shopgirls and window cleaners and hairdressers and actors. I started to tell Barbara about another bar that had closed now that was down by the river, but the jukebox drowned me out and all the women were singing along with Tina Turner. I suddenly imagine
d we are all on a great cruise ship, voyaging together, the boat rocking from side to side, the jukebox playing and playing until it squeaked and gasped with the effort. I shouted over at Barbara.
‘This is all we’ve got!’ even though it made no sense. Barbara burst into tears. I put my arm round her and my bare skin stuck to her neck. I kept thinking about primitive vessels with pieces missing, leaving unmendable, echoing holes, and how all those women would disappear into the daylight, dissolving like soluble aspirin. Barbara’s face was smeared with gin. She looked like the type who cried if you showed her affection... I did and she cried for weeks. Sleeping together was always wet, but not in the erotic sense. Her straps got in the way and she ground her teeth at night which drove me crazy.
That’s the general course of things. I take off my spectacles, put on hair gel and a leather jacket and meet women in bars and take them home. I look after them. In the end I stop listening to them, and they leave and go somewhere else. They write to me, and tell me how their lives have changed and how they have found themselves in Blackpool or the Gambia. I am always part of their former lives, an incidental step in their struggle for identification and self-awareness. That’s how it was with Barbara, who went to Marseille. We left the bar together and tottered home. I showed her my collection of Egyptian nick-nacks. She fell asleep, her dress crumpled.
It would not be like this with Eva, I thought. Eva would be consistent. She was not the type that needed to be held up with scaffolding. She had no special scent that she kept in a bottle until the dark hours when it was safe to splash it on her wrists and smell out others with the same pong. All right, she was probably straight, but people change, and underneath her overall she had a significant swagger. I would change her, I thought. Then she could look after me.
The Ruination Of Jean’s Legs
The first spell in the nursery was really very happy. There was some physical discomfort, but most of the time I was lost in some other landscape, not in a house at all, protected by the mess of my imagination. Things started to deteriorate one day when Frank and I reached a terrible stalemate in a furious night-long battle between the men of Lego and the strange doll army. By morning both sides lay massacred on the floor, and there was nothing left to kill. The atmosphere was so bad that I escaped down the narrow corridor looking for somewhere to examine my bruises, leaving Frank pulling the last hairs from an innocent doll’s bewildered head.
At the top of a landing I smelt roasting dinner and heard tinkling voices, the colour of confetti. Guests, I thought.
When guests came to the house Jean often pretended that she had no children, and put on airs that were made of brandy and aspic, and demanded sophisticated conversation. I carried on upstairs, and went into Jean’s bedroom.
I went straight to the cupboard. I was completely naked as Frank had thrown all my clothes out of the window. The cupboard was as large as a room and was filled with feathery dresses and sulky coats, huddling together in the dark. I crouched among a row of viciously spiked shoes. I could hear Frank prowling through the upper corridors holding a flaming torch, with a plastic bag pulled over his head.
I climbed further in, over hat boxes and shoe horns, and that’s when I saw the pair of red shoes, wrapped in a fragile cloud of white tissue paper.
They stood brightly beneath Jean’s wedding veil, which was made of garlic skins and silver fish. I touched the shoes. They smelt warm, as if they had recently been on someone’s feet. I put them to my ear, and heard a distant trumpet playing jazz, and then I put them on. I pulled Mother’s veil from the peg and hung it over my face. I felt airy and diaphanous. I wondered if I might be invisible.
I stepped out of the cupboard. It must have been Sunday because the stairs stank of gravy. I tiptoed down to the first landing, glancing down a long corridor to see Frank at the top of a winding staircase preparing a lethal and complex trap for me with drawing pins and a pair of sock suspenders. He didn’t see me as I glided past in my splendour. I navigated the lower landings and the uneven stairs, leaving imprints in the carpets with my high heels. In the dining room they were clinking, purring and giggling. I pushed open the door and smiled proudly.
The room was filled with bulky suburbians, and a grandmother with wired teeth. They turned to me fiercely and put their sherry glasses down. I started to whirl around, with my arms outstretched, in a giddy circle. My body seemed to take on its own momentum and, spinning, I crashed into one of the guests, spilling brown-coloured drink down his white shirt. Jean was shrieking. George was guffawing. In the oven a lamb was just beginning to burn. I fell backwards onto the floor, banging my head on someone’s pointed shoe.
There was a long, baking pause.
‘Someone has been where they shouldn’t!’ lipped a man with poodle whiskers.
Jean snatched the veil from my head. My body was immediately cold. The grandmother made a slurping sound. Jean caught my wrist and ankle, and scooped me up. The last red shoe dangled from my toe as if it hung from the tip of a tongue.
She carried me up the stairs, snarling, and stormed down the long corridor to the Furthest Nursery and tripped on the sock suspender, dropping me as she tumbled.
It should have ended there, the small domestic accident during Sunday dinner, but instead it expanded into a full-length feature. Frank and I stared with wide-open dolly eyes as Jean began to fall down the chasm of spiky stairs, banging her fragile head over and over again. She slumped into unconsciousness around a potted plant. Her feet seemed to be pointing the wrong way.
I think that Frank disappeared. George phoned an ambulance.
I thought I’d killed her.
Downstairs the guests sat in ecclesiastical silence.
And I opened my eyes and saw the red shoes walking back up the stairs, by themselves.
I suppose that was the start of it; the hallucinations, if that’s what they were.
The incident of the Red Shoes permanently injured Jean. She spent some time in hospital, and her ankles were never as fluid again. (One was broken, the other badly sprained. She also had three stitches in her head.) She was less connected, and her whole being became more glassy.
Jean never mentioned this incident, but I think of it every day. I wonder, if she had retained the agility of her legs, if she would have been a happier person. On the other hand, if her legs had been stronger then she might have run off. Frank was never punished for his part in Jean’s accident. George observed him as if he was an enigma, or a trick question that they couldn’t work out the answer to. Frank, on the other hand, had an answer for everything. He never even looked guilty.
Eva
On firework night I saw Eva meeting another woman under a lamp post. Eva had taken off her overall and was standing dreamily in a pool of ochre light opposite the institute, when a fierce woman appeared with arms outstretched, apologizing for her lateness. She kissed Eva on both cheeks, and Eva smiled calmly. The two of them were like night and day. Eva was pale with moon-coloured skin, and her friend was hot and summery with bright clothes and curling ginger hair. As the woman spoke I saw her reach up to Eva’s face and wipe away a smudge of lipstick left by the kisses. I could hear her voice rising and falling from across the road. They linked arms and walked away, and I stood there watching as Eva chattered into the other one’s ear.
They disappeared behind a wall of double decker buses, and I was left standing in the dark, twiddling my fingers in my pockets, wondering if I was jealous. In the distance I could hear fireworks screaming and exploding. As I walked home I thought about George on firework nights, lighting the blue touch paper and retiring, while Frank and I stood dumbly watching a Catherine wheel reeling, then spluttering to a cindery halt. That’s the bit I remember most about fireworks. The way they died.
The Attic
While Jean was in hospital I was given a new two-legged doll with luscious blond hair and eggshell eyelids that gurgled with despair when I held her upside down, and who wetted herself continually, and
a pyjama case in the form of a sleeping lion. At first I thought it was my birthday, but then I realized that the gifts were heralds of terrible news.
I was to be moved from the Furthest Nursery to the attic, where, George said, I wouldn’t be influenced. Frank smirked from the doorway of the nursery as I lugged an armful of frightened toys up the sinister stairway. Each stair groaned and sighed. I stopped halfway and looked down at George who stood on the landing frowning. I considered dropping a spinning top on to his head, and escaping, but his hair was hard and crinkly, like a helmet, and I didn’t know then where I would run beyond the brick walls of the long garden, or the sweet shop on the corner, and there was always the matter of strangers and their penises to consider, so I trudged on.
The attic was so low and cramped that George had to bend double to enter it. It was a small intense room with leafy wallpaper and a sloping floor. The moment I walked into it I knew it was full of unresolved misery. In Jean’s absence, Carmen the cleaner had tried to make it nice, with pictures on the walls of innocent animals and a jungle bedspread, but underneath it smelt mothy and festering. Carmen came in and opened the window, and an ivy tendril curled over the sill. I sat down on the bed, feeling ostracized. I could hear Frank and the toys shrieking and warring in the distant country of the Furthest Nursery.
I wondered what I was supposed to do in my attic?
I shut my eyes and wished for company.
There was suddenly a strong and unbearable smell, of spa water and flatulence. I heard scratching. A queen bee flew drunkenly into the room. Someone breathed in my ear. I tried to call out but my voice was a shrill cantata. I ran downstairs, past a radio playing hissing random music.
While Jean was in hospital George had taken over the domestic organization of the house. He was building a luxurious cake with sponge finger scaffolding, and cream filling. He stood in the dusky kitchen holding an egg whisk in his right hand, with a silk scarf tied around his head, whipping egg white into a stiff frenzy.
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