I wore unwashed clothes, the hems encrusted with mildew, and painted my dour face with sticky white foundation. I resembled a Halloween ghoul. I spat at churches. I scratched my name on gravestones.
Jean wished I had never been born, and browsed angrily through the prospectuses of disciplinarian boarding schools. I waited for calamity, sure that it would come down on my head at any moment.
The Navigator’s Compass
The first thing I saw when we unlocked the door of our love nest was a bookcase and on it the complete leather-bound works of Harriet Smiles. I tried to hang my coat over the bookcase, so that the books were obscured, but it dropped to the floor. I considered throwing them out of the window, but decided that this might alarm Eva who was sitting peaceably on the bed admiring the decor.
Our bedroom was plum coloured and perched on the upper turret of the Navigator’s Compass. Eva had a suitcase made of iron with enough clothes in it to sink the Titanic. I lay on the bed and tried to look voluptuous, while Eva unpacked her array of nightclothes, day wear and cosmetic oils, pastes and enigmatic ointments. I had already emptied a carrier bag containing only a T-shirt and a packet of aspirin.
The room was mostly bed, with a vast coverlet inlaid with pictures of drifting ships. Downstairs the theme was ‘treasure’ and the bar was a pirate’s cave. It was out of season and the place smelt of dredgers and oil rigs. Eva had already made friends with the hotel dog, who was aptly named Endeavour, and whose legs were too far apart so that he creaked when he walked. I ordered a bottle of rum and some cans of coke. It was four o’clock and the sky was dark and milky. Scarborough had a wide and curving promenade with elegant lamp posts. It rattled and shivered with cold pebbles thrown up from the beach. Eva, having put her spotless underwear neatly into the mahogany chest of drawers, slumped down beside me and held my sweaty hand in hers in a gesture that was overtly friendly and companionable.
I poured us both a Cuba Libre, and we chinked the glasses together and giggled, ‘bottoms up’.
‘I hope Mother is all right,’ said Eva, looking dreamily out of the window as if the answer might arrive by pigeon post.
We lay there then, in the half light, listening to seagulls and faraway fruit machines. I was about to speak, to confess everything, to offer all, to make the speech that I had prepared for months. I turned to Eva, but she was fast asleep, her mouth slightly open, her face calm as the night desert. I relaxed again. The bed floated into a longer twilight. It was peaceful to be stretched out in an unknown place. I dreamt for a while, of albatrosses and whales, of flying carpets skimming over flaking museums.
I woke in the glow of a candle. Eva was opening a bottle of champagne. She turned to me with a glass and her teeth glittered as she yawned and smiled. I had forgotten the speech, although fragments of it returned to me as I tasted the dry, sweet liquid.
I opened my mouth, but as I did, I smelt ink. A camphor fog filled my head. I put the glass down and Eva said, ‘What’s the matter Gert?’
‘Can you smell something?’
‘No.’
There were too many shadows in the room, colliding with each other. The shape of a thin head glided along the wall.
‘Can you see that?’ I screeched.
‘Calm down,’ whispered Eva. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ I paused. ‘Eva!’
‘What?’
A voice was whispering in my ear, a cold clammy voice that spoke urgently, but incomprehensibly.
Eva grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look into her eyes. I saw her then. Another woman’s features crossed Eva’s face like a cloud across the moon. They were my mother’s.
I screamed, and jumped away. I started to run, out of the bedroom, down the stairs, waking other residents, setting off fire alarms, forcing the lazy Endeavour to behave like a savage guard dog.
Eva was yelling from the top of the stairs. I heard an elderly guest mutter, ‘Fucking dykes!’ as I tumbled into the hallway.
Then Eva was there again. She was giving me water. I spluttered, ‘I’m a haunted lesbian!’
‘What do you mean, haunted?’ Eva snapped. Behind her a platoon of guests looked down on me, lying in my knickers and T-shirt in the foyer of the Navigator’s Compass.
‘For God’s sake!’ cried Eva.
‘I’m not well,’ I bleated, and the assembled guests shook their heads.
The proprietor stepped forward and asked Eva to put me to bed, and whether I needed a doctor. Eva dragged me back to the bedroom where she administered aspirin with the aplomb of a registered nurse. There was something final about the way that she tore the silver wrapper. She tucked me into bed, pinning me down with the covers as if I was a dangerous animal and pragmatically drank the last of the champagne without offering me any. I watched her, my eyes full of need.
She opened the window and sat there smoking a long cigarette, not looking at me.
‘One thing I don’t need Gert,’ she announced finally, in the voice that she used to speak to evasive shop assistants, ‘is another invalid. Do you understand?’ Then she walked out, slamming the door. I don’t know where she went, but she disappeared for hours. I cried all over the maritime bed cover.
The room was dark as rum when she finally reappeared. She climbed into bed wearing a pair of scarlet pyjamas, turning her broad back to me and sleeping.
‘Sorry,’ I whimpered, as dawn cracked over the window-sill.
I could hear her wincing when I said it.
Trouble With My Face
At the grammar school I was being slowly boiled in the afternoon sun, which glared at me through the sheet windows of our prefabricated classroom. We had been making papyrus with glue and paper scraps. I sat at the back. I had stopped asking questions. The paper became a wad of sticky pulp. All I could think about was Captain Beefhart and escape. As I mulched on with my failed papyrus I told the Captain about my ambitions. I wanted to develop a sneer. I wanted to be pale like the man in the graveyard; pale as the stars that Frank traced through his telescope. I wanted to be so bad that badness couldn’t reach me. If you can’t beat it, join it, I reasoned.
I bent my lips into leering contortions, unaware of a ghastly silence in the room. They were watching me with a great repressed inbreath of mirth. Miss Reedcake held her fountain pen between two index fingers and let the moment ride. My moment of realization came with a frozen expression of hate. For a moment I was stuck; nose scrumpled, teeth bared, eyes bulging.
‘What are you thinking about Gert?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘My face itches, that’s all.’
The frog girls were smirking. Francesca winked at me helpfully. Miss Reedcake lifted me from my seat with her neat eyes and sent me along the dead corridors to see Miss Oar, the headmistress with the mind of an anchor. I was bleeding again and my sanitary towel was as damp as my armpits. I waited outside her office, peering quickly down into my cavernous knickers and gassing myself with the scent of rotting brown animal.
The red traffic light outside her office flashed to green, and I entered her office with Captain Beefhart strapped to my shoulder like a parrot. He disintegrated when she looked up. Her face was a nasty spoon. She was the enemy.
‘You again.’ She untied her mouth and cracked her tongue.
‘I haven’t done anything.’ Yet.
‘Your parents must be very disappointed in you.’
At that moment Jean was ambling up an aisle in the new Sainsbury’s, tipping ten packs of butter into the trolley and deciding to try an avocado pear. She was having a good day.
Miss Oar’s mouth was opening and closing. She told me I came from a good family; that I must learn to iron my face each morning, that I continually distracted the other girls, and that if I didn’t start concentrating I would have to have corrective treatment.
She picked up a paper knife and twisted it in the air.
From now on, she continued, her terrible perm flopp
ing over her waxy forehead, I would always have to sit at the front, whatever the occasion, so that my face could be continually monitored.
I shrugged. So what. And stared back at her, mesmerized by a hairy mole on her neck. She dismissed me with venom and I swaggered back to Miss Reedcake.
I was slouched and indifferent. The other girls avoided me anyway and wouldn’t lend me rubbers. Miss Oar was part of my corruption. She made me feel that nothing mattered.
I dragged my feet as I walked home, stopping at a waste paper basket to tip out the contents of my satchel. I swore out loud. I loitered at the bus stop looking for cigarette ends. I undid the top button of my shirt so that my vest showed.
I craved vice.
I lingered in back lanes and unsafe routes, hovering in the graveyard with my skirt rolled over exposing my naked thighs. When the artist appeared he surveyed me with a ponderous sigh, and wrote something in his black notebook. I sat on a gravestone with him. He didn’t speak but he stared in a cruel way and offered me a Number Six cigarette. I smoked it with the ease of a practised smoker.
‘Who are you?’ he grunted after the stubs had left two black eyes on an epitaph.
‘Gert,’ I answered truthfully. ‘I’m interested in art.’
‘Fuck that,’ he catapulted. ‘You’ll get me arrested.’
Then he leant back and ran his hard eyes over me.
‘Gert,’ he murmured, as if it was an idea he had just had.
Sibling Rivalry
‘Frank!’
‘What?’
‘Fuck you Frank!’
‘What for? I thought we were getting on rather well.’
‘You got the telescope, you got the gown, you got the private education. What did I get?’
‘You envy me that? Whips and cold baths! You were all right.’
‘That’s not the point. What do I get now? Begging letters! You don’t get them. I do.’
‘There’s nothing I can do about that.’
‘That’s what you always said. Poor, delicate Frank who can’t handle emotion, or upheaval, and mad Gert who gets the lot!’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Some. They spent more money on you.’
‘Money is unimportant.’
‘Maybe to you it is. I may lose my job, then what do I do?’
We are all responsible for ourselves.’
‘Frank.’
‘What?’
‘Sometimes I really hate you.’
The Art Of Disobedience
At fourteen I learnt the art of lurking. I had already given up sleep. At night I tiptoed down the attic stairs and the whole house trembled with my disobedience. I slid out of the front door and into the street. I went to the graveyard with its stone angels and pagan gargoyles and lay under a tree which was an umbrella with a canopy of lungs. I made up miserable songs which I sang in a low monotone. I was always looking for the artist. I drifted to the water meadow and walked through clumps of nettles until my ankles grew numb elephantine skins. I walked slowly, wrapped in a duffle coat, hoping that something would happen. I stretched out in fields of dark buttercups, staring heavenward at the Seven Sisters and the Plough and I considered my insignificance. When birds began to call and the milk train shunted from the station I dragged home; cold and disappointed.
At school I was too grey and tired to be rebellious. A girl called Emily from the fifth form had been expelled for stealing a blue coat from Top Shop. Emily came from the lands beyond the station, with bric-a-brac shops and dogs with teeth. She was rny heroine after that, with her chewing gum and her slanting eyelashes. I liked to think that she was free to loiter all night and day. Miss Oar tried to convince us that she had disgraced the school. She was not even good enough for Woolworths, she said.
In the evenings I wired myself up to the reel-to-reel tape recorder and listened to Bob Dylan groaning and the Captain growling, Gimme that heart boy.
I sneered in time to the music. No-one ever came to the attic. It had changed colour. The inside of my head was purple.
Jean was often in her nightclothes. When I slouched past her bedroom door she would coo my name softly and I would have to go in. She would just lie there in a sea of tissue paper, very pale, but not ill, she said, just resting.
I wouldn’t ask her any questions in case her voice became tremulous. George was away fixing up a crocodile handbag factory in Rotterdam. Jean had a large cat with a silver face that guarded her. If I went in the room it hissed. When she got up she might listen to quiet trumpet music and write long letters on thin paper at the window. Perhaps the tourists thought she was a literary person. Perhaps she was.
A Box Of Chocolates
Jean asked me sometimes why I perpetually frowned. I told her that I had grown that way, since there was so little light in my bedroom, but the truth was that I skilfully applied make-up to my face in an attempt to make myself look ironic.
I had even fooled my own mother.
One day I was walking home talking to the Captain backstage in America. Then I walked into a thin post and looked up guiltily. It was the artist. He was whistling. My heart was a Ginger Baker solo. He held out his long fingers and in the centre of his palm was a blue speck wrapped in Sellotape.
‘Do you want some acid?’ he drawled. We were standing in the High Street surrounded by Conservatives and men’s outfitters. I swallowed the pill. If it had been arsenic I would have taken it. I peeled off the yellow tape and plopped it in my mouth. It was so small that it was tasteless. He snorted with laughter, as if it was a great joke. Then he walked away. I followed him. He wasn’t walking straight. He tottered to the graveyard and through the dim doors of the church.
Inside it was subdued and murky, and heavy like the interior of a dense forest. A choir was rehearsing in the vestry. They kept starting and stopping. The artist clambered into a pew and gazed up at the stained-glass window. I perched beside him; my satchel knocking prayer books onto the stone floor. At first I felt nothing. I noticed Miss Lute carrying a bunch of dried honesty to the altar. She wore a paisley smocking dress. She waved at me and I sniggered and raised my hand into a semi-salute.
Suddenly there was carpet everywhere; up the walls and covering the artist’s body. Even the stone was thick with Persian designs and the air was full and solid. My raised hand left a shape behind it. The gigantic pulpit was an eagle flapping its wings; a group of gargoyles clustered together, chatting with clay mouths. I pointed at them, snorting with laughter. When I laughed bubbles rose up from my nose and spun in spirals to the fluted ceiling, where rafters clapped, and hymns hung in large drops of rain. The artist took my hand. We floated down the aisle to the pretty altar where the embroidered cloth writhed and heaved. Miss Lute was on her knees arranging great palm trees. She looked up and exclaimed.
‘My, my!’
I beamed at her and swam on, full of love for Miss Lute, whose toy face was polished and wholesome.
‘My, my!’
We were in the cloister, where the famous dead lay. The low walkway was full of people, outlined with lead. We arrived at a plaque in memory of Harriet Smiles, and there she was. I wasn’t at all surprised. In fact I was glad to see her, full on. She sat on a marble plinth waiting for me. She wasn’t a very attractive person, with a small weak chin, and hair parted abruptly down the middle. Her face was rather sheepish. She held out her arm as if to shake hands, but I shook my head. Then she cursed, and pulled up her horrible black taffeta skirt and showed me her legs which were made of glass and filled with scraps of screwed-up paper.
‘Gert,’ she whispered. ‘Please help me! I’ve got melancholy.’
‘Fuck off,’ I said, enjoying the cut of the word. ‘I don’t give a shit about you or your fucking boring poetry.’ I ran away from her then. Did she understand bad language? The artist had sailed off using his long coat as a rudder. When I ran after him it was like flying through a jigsaw. I found him by the river completely naked. He was face down on a wooden bri
dge. I removed my shoes and socks and put them in the water like boats. They floated off in opposite directions. My toes were all alone then, and sad, so I started the long wade to retrieve them. The river was much deeper than I thought and the current was strong. I plunged about in clumsy strides. Everything took days. I got tangled up in the weedy hairs that entwined themselves round my legs. I was very wet. I was like a fisherwoman. I finally baited my shoes.
I followed a path that was encrusted with jewels and shouted to the immobile artist who was washing himself with blue light. He didn’t answer. I heard voices calling my name, and decided, stupidly, to go home.
When I got to the front door, smeared with river mud and weed, there was a crowd of people in the hallway, standing over the telephone ambiguously. There was Miss Lute and a policeman with a helmet on, George, still in his overcoat with airline labels attached to the hem, holding the telephone receiver as if it was a new invention, and Jean who resembled an inmate from the Kingdom of Leaves. She was wetter than I was. Her tears had soaked the front of her nightdress and her complexion was wrung out. She was striding up and down, followed by her silver cat. I smiled broadly. Everyone looked up from their drama when I opened the door. There were still Persian carpets flying out of the corners of my vision. I was stiff and weary.
Jean swivelled and shrieked, then slapped me on the side of my ear. It was as if a huge explosion erupted in my brain. I sat down. Their faces loomed over me like puddings, then swerved away to a huddle in the corner of the room, leaving me staring at a dancing porcelain figure on the coffee table, who kicked her legs high in a flirtatious polka. The policeman was the first to speak.
‘Do you realize that it’s the middle of the night? Your mother was out of her mind with worry.’
Crocodile Soup Page 13