A Letter From Mabel
Dear Gert,
Your mother Jean has recently been in touch with me about her circumstances, which sound absolutely dire. I would like to take her in myself, but I am at present the lady captain of the golf club here in Woking, and I have a very busy schedule. I don’t feel I am in a position to really support your mother, and frankly I don’t think it’s my responsibility.
I would imagine you would want to welcome her with open arms. Think of all she has done for you! You were a very difficult child. You were always making up awful stories, and disrupting dinner parties. It was obviously attention seeking. Several times I suggested to Jean that she sent you away to some kind of boarding school, but she never did. You hardly ever smiled, and were consistently ungrateful even though you never wanted for anything and were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Why have you not been in touch with her? Do you understand how desperate she is? We all say and do things we don’t mean at different points in our lives, and it’s important to learn to forgive. Don’t you think she’s been through enough?
I shan’t say anything about this letter to her. I just hope you pay some attention to it, and do something.
Yours sincerely
Mabel
The Dunkirk Spirit
Christmas came and went with a flurry of municipal bells, and neon reindeer leaping across the high street. As usual I spent the festive season entirely alone, despite another pleading Christmas card from Jean, depicting the Virgin Mary hanging onto Jesus surrounded by vindictive cherubim. I was still trying to pluck up the courage to invite Eva to come away with me. Instead we exchanged cards in the toilets. I chose an image of two angels kissing, and she gave me a snowy landscape with glittering stars. I welcomed the advent of the cabin-fever months. January was as cold and dark as Siberia, and the institute felt huge, damp and empty, with threatening winds rattling every window. All the staff felt under siege, and appeared each morning in armoured rainwear.
After the meeting when the Head Curator warned us that our livelihoods were on the line the Dunkirk spirit infected the staff at the institute, and this was particularly advantageous in the development of my friendship with Eva. Since the choking incident in the café we had engaged in several long conversations, but now everyone’s emotions were raw, and it was confiding time.
We talked together earnestly in the toilets at the museum. I savoured every detail I learnt about her life. She was born within yards of the scaly quay with its shining wet cobbles and stench of sack and lobster. She grew up in a gingham dress and sand shoes, catching crabs and shutting the door when the storms came. She never lost sight of the sea. The queen (I believe it was the same princess who held the swan’s feather fan) came in a pompous hat to launch the giant ships that dwarfed the terraced houses, and cruised away, splattered with champagne, to Japan or America. Some weeks the quayside would be filled with Russians, or Italians, or men with beards of froth from Norway. They came and went with the tide. Eva told me her skin was good because of her diet of fish oil and seaweed. She danced too, in a dress embossed with a thousand sequins, and her partner was called Adrian and they were like brother and sister. Her room was full of prizes, she told me, silver trophies and gold medallions. Her mother was waiting for her father to come in from work with his lamp, although he was squashed fifteen years ago between two tugs pulling in different directions. Eva cared for her mother; washing her bent back and wiping her old nose. She was an only daughter. If she didn’t work, Eva confessed, she would go out of her mind. There were times when she watched television programmes about euthanasia. She wanted a life, she said, beyond foxtrots, tangos and bedpans. She wanted to know what made other human beings tick.
She had a lad but she didn’t love him. When they kissed her mind wandered and she never let him stray inside her buttons. She wanted a lad who could conduct a conversation. I told her that I’d never met a man who could hold my attention, and she nodded and looked into my eyes until my ears popped.
The toilet was the colour of fly paper, and it got very cosy in there after the hand dryer had been on for an hour. The Head Curator informed us that the whole building would soon be utterly reorganized, from the toilet to the roof, and that we would be joining the new breed of museum which was accessible and immediate with hands-on displays and quizzes. He believed we were hopelessly antiquated, and stared at my hands as if they had no potential. This policy would have implications for Theobald and his gnats, for me and my vessels, and Eva and her Nescafé. The Head Curator asked me to consider the Egyptian section and have a brainstorm with him the following week. He felt the mummy was under used, and I told Eva how I kept going to commune with her leathery, melancholic face, and how much I feared for her future. Eva knew what I meant. Not only was she beautiful, she was also understanding.
Becoming A Horse
A horse was stronger than a swan. When I was eight I became a horse, which was better than being a boy or a girl. I was a palomino with a swishing tail. I galloped to breakfast. I snorted and neighed. At school, alone, I cantered the perimeters of the playground. I ate grass. I stayed as long as I could in the garden, pawing the rose bushes with my hooves, jumping the garden furniture. I shied away when Jean came to catch me and galloped up and down the garden path until she lassoed me with her apron strings and led me to the horseless attic where I had to become a girl until dawn.
Being a horse was very demanding. I needed a lot of exercise. I had a grooming kit with which I brushed myself down at night.
I was very happy. Horse hide protected me from Mr Whitebait, from strangers, and from other children, and even, I thought, from ghosts.
But one night, when the moon was full, I woke up and felt an overwhelming presence in the attic. The room seemed to be full of rustling, and faint whispers. I began to sweat, and fumbled feverishly for the light switch. Then something cold touched my face and I reared up in bed, as a clammy hand caught me by the mane and jumped on my back. It felt like a great wad of poetry, squeezing me until I could hardly breathe.
I crashed down the dangerous stairs, with the thing clinging onto my neck. I writhed and rolled on the landing carpet, but it hung on sniggering. I screamed and bolted further down into the labyrinth of the house and quill spurs cut into my sides. I charged outside, and careered up and down the street, which was empty of tourists, and murky as cobwebs.
The lights were going on in the house. George was looming up at the window, pointing down at me as I neighed to him desperately.
They followed me down into the street, Jean and George, wet from sleep and angry from their own bad dreams. They grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.
‘She’s sleepwalking. It’s Dusty Springfield all over again!’ Jean wailed.
I slumped down onto the hard pavement. The weight flew from my back leaving a trail of ink in a stain over my father’s face, which he wiped away as if it had never been there.
He picked me up. I pleaded with him.
‘Don’t leave me!’
Jean had gone to read Doctor Spock by candlelight.
George carried me back upstairs. I could feel his heart beating through his nylon pyjamas. He was embarrassed. He tried to leave me at the door of the attic.
I twisted away from him and scuttled downstairs. He thundered after me. I sprinted down the long corridor to the Furthest Nursery. Frank was sitting up in bed, calmly awake. Frank claimed that he never slept.
George was calling down the corridor. His voice echoed. It sounded as if he was shouting from the bottom of a well.
I looked around desperately. More than anything I didn’t want to return to the attic. My sides still remembered the clasp of ghostly knees.
Jean was striding up the stairs, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves. She was chanting my misdemeanours in a rosary.
Frank opened his mouth. ‘Here!’ he commanded.
‘Where?’ I bleated.
Frank pointed with his finger.
With one last yell I leapt into the air.
I jumped into Frank, and he swallowed me, just as my father’s hand reached for my neck. For a while I was sliding through darkness, and then I was suddenly in a neat, dustless room. A sign on the wall said PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.
Some mathematical magazines lay on a hexagonal table. The walls were embossed with pale algebraic symbols. There was a distant sound of typewriters.
I sat on a square chair and swung my legs. It was a little boring. There were no pictures, and although there was one door, as if leading to a doctor’s surgery, I was unwilling to barge through it.
I chewed my sleeves. I bit my fingernails.
In the pockets of my pyjamas I found a blunt pencil. I nibbled its dry wood. Then I had an idea. I licked the lead, and wrote upon the bland wall GERT WAS HERE!
Next to the words I drew a horse and a fish.
When I had finished I looked proudly at my contribution to the white walls.
The room began to shake.
Then the door opened and I saw a flight of steps leading up.
The vibrating reached earthquake proportions. I ran up the stairs. My legs had lengthened and I was able to sprint five steps at a time. Behind me there was a sound like an almighty roaring wave. I turned around, terrified. White horses with watery manes were galloping behind me.
I reached a plateau. I was on the diving board at Mr Valentine’s River Club. I curved into a perfect arc, and dived.
I landed in a pool of vomit. My parents gazed down at me, horrified. Frank looked over me, his eyes bulging, his mouth open.
My pyjamas were completely wet.
No-one spoke. Jean took Frank and I to the bathroom and washed us in tepid water while she wrung out our night clothes. She rubbed us angrily with a gritty towel until our skins burnt, then fed us both pink medicine from a bottle at the top of the cupboard. Frank moaned that his stomach ached. Then Frank and I were tucked firmly into our parents’ bed. The light was left on. We curled happily into the oversize pillows. I don’t know where Jean and George slept. Maybe they sat up all night because in the morning the house was full of bottles and ashtrays and George had a red mark on one side of his face.
I woke up human. All my horse sense had gone.
Frank said something was gnawing at his insides, and later he blamed me for his dodgy digestion, but I never got the chance to go back and rub out my name, so I suppose it’s still there, disturbing Frank’s white interior.
Shopping With Eva
One day in the toilet Eva asked me if I would like to go into the town with her.
‘What for?’ I asked, dumbly.
‘To shop, of course,’ she said.
So the next day, which was a Saturday, we met under the statue of a naked golden lady with upturned breasts who balanced above a clock. Eva had a hungry look about her. She grabbed my shoulder and pushed me into a huge department store; the kind of place that I would normally avoid. She started to dart around, while I watched, listlessly fingering the odd brassiere strap. Normally I would spend a minimum amount of time in such shops. I bought all my meals from Marks 8c Spencer, which I was afraid was giving my skin a kind of cling-film texture. I bought my clothes from Burton; men’s shirts and square jackets, and hard, cardboard jeans. I never bought anything in a sale. Make-up departments in stores made me feel like a man in drag.
Eva seemed to know everything about shopping. She kept on quoting makes and brands that I had never heard of. She was only interested in bargains. Her hands filched their way into the back of the store where unspeakable scoops went unnoticed.
‘Come on Gert!’ she rallied, while I held the carrier bags uncertainly. I suppose for her it must have been like shopping with a disinterested boyfriend. I think that I was beginning to get on her nerves, so I tried to be enthusiastic.
She bought Italian shoes for a pound, silk flowers at five pence each, smoked salmon for fifty pence. If I attempted to converse she didn’t answer. She had a glazed, mesmerized expression. In fact, one might have thought, looking at her sad figurehead eyes, and serious expression, that she was depressed, or certainly eccentric. In each new shop she stopped for a moment, feeling the atmosphere, fingers twitching, waiting for inspiration. When she did move, she was fast, like a hunting dog at the neck of a fox. Lambswool sweaters for five pounds, Brazilian fruit squeezers for nineteen ninety-nine (apparently that was very cheap).
Assistants were afraid of her. I noticed them moving closer together when she walked through the automatic doors. Sometimes they pressed secret bells under the counter. Plain-clothes detectives drifted around her helplessly. She was an outlaw, a highway woman of the High Street. Oil of Ulay, slightly damaged packaging, one pound. Ten yards of crushed velvet, eight pounds.
‘What’s it all for?’ I enquired dimly, craving her attention. We were sitting at a bus stop, surrounded by bags.
‘I sell it,’ she said glumly. ‘Do you think I live on my wages? I do the job because I like to get out of the house.’
She licked her lips. A bus appeared and we both got on. It was filled with strappy girls in blue shirts carrying school books. We sat upstairs in the front seats. Eva grinned. She was beginning to relax.
‘I have two talents,’ she boasted loudly. ‘Shopping and dancing. Otherwise I’m just like anyone else.’
The rest of the people on the bus all stared at her. She was alarmingly beautiful, in a bright red coat with a rabbit fur collar. Her hair was so shiny it looked wet.
‘You’re amazing,’ I mumbled sycophantically. An old lady sitting behind us in a fishnet scarf nodded in agreement.
‘Yes,’ said the old woman. ‘She would look lovely in fresh snow.’
We both gazed at Eva lovingly.
‘Stop it,’ she shouted suddenly. ‘Stop looking at me!’
The lady blushed and pulled out a trembling shopping list.
‘I never bought any rouge!’ she moaned.
‘Rouge?’ Eva asked, looking apologetic. ‘You want to buy that in the shopping mall under the Swallow Hotel. It’s very dark, like going into a cave. There’s a chemist there.’
‘I know it,’ whispered the lady, bent towards Eva. It was as if they were dealing in heroin.
‘Go in quietly,’ muttered Eva, ‘and go to the very back of the shop. There’s a basket there filled with old lipsticks. Nothing special.’
‘Yes.’
‘Put your hand deep into the basket,’ I saw an image of her reaching for fish in cold water, ‘and you’ll feel some little round tubs. Bourgeois. Fifty pence. Best rouge on the market.’
‘Thank you.’ The old lady winked gratefully. Eva clicked her heels together.
‘Isn’t this your stop Gert?’
I left her then.
I didn’t know what she made of me. What talents did I have? Why did she make me feel simultaneously weak and powerful? Why did I love her?
Doctor Diamond And The Gullible Heart
After the night of the horse Jean took me to the doctor. I expected to be seen again by the dry, rummy doctor who I saw when I had the mumps, but he turned out to have died. We sat together in the waiting room for hours while a toddler in a blazing jacket whirled around the small space, knocking old ladies off their chairs and hurling broken toys at innocent people’s legs. His mother was reading an article in Woman about child murderers.
I wondered why Jean never noticed my physical injuries? The swans’ bites for instance? Was she afraid that it was she who had inflicted them on me? Increasingly, my image of her got more and more hazy. She seemed to float above the ground. She was not dissimilar in her presence to the intangible shadow that inhabited the attic, although she was a lot better looking. Why didn’t anyone take any interest? What were they up to?
‘Gertrude Hardcastle!’ a nurse yelled into the waiting room, making everyone jump. Jean yanked me to my feet. She had an angry expression.
The stony nurse led us down some back stairs to another room, that had a torn sc
rap of paper with the words Doctor Diamond written in felt tip on it pinned to the door.
Jean tripped and cursed, and then marched in with a hostile lurch.
Doctor Diamond’s surgery was obviously temporary but not unpleasant. I observed her mantelpiece with mute interest. It was covered with rosettes. A drying rose stood in a thin vase on her desk. A beam of sunlight crossed the room.
Jean snorted and sat down. Why was she so annoyed?
Doctor Diamond must have been about the same age as my mother. She reminded me of someone from the television, with a suntanned neck, and a mane of black hair. She had a gold ring on her middle finger that Jean eyed with suspicion.
Jean growled, ‘This child won’t sleep. She’s feral in her habits. She hallucinates. I feel as if I’m going mad!’ and blew her nose.
Doctor Diamond laughed inappropriately, and asked me to strip off to my vest and to lie on a hard high bed so she could investigate my physical body.
Her brown hands smelt of saddle soap.
Jean stared, watching her with trapped-bird eyes.
‘Open your mouth wide,’ instructed Doctor Diamond.
‘There’s nothing wrong with her mouth,’ Jean muttered. ‘It’s her bloody brain that’s round the twist.’ Then, ‘It’s not my fault!’
That’s why she was angry.
Doctor Diamond ignored Jean and sifted through my hair with a metal comb, then peeped into my ears with a fierce torch. She prodded the skin around my temples and tweaked at my eyelids. She ferreted around in the back of my throat, and banged my chest with a dull spoon. She told me to bend and stretch. She pulled my fingers and toes. She karate-chopped my knees and listened, with a melancholy expression, to my ribs.
Jean interrupted, ‘Are you a student?’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I’m just here for a week.’
‘Typical,’ grumbled Jean.
Doctor Diamond said to me, ‘Do you like horses?’
Crocodile Soup Page 9