‘Home!’ she boomed, frightening the foundations. ‘How delightful!’
Everything Margaret uttered was filled with praise. She complimented the table, the plates, the window-sills, my nose and my mother’s necklace before plumping herself down and wiping her eyes.
‘I am so, so sorry!’ she moaned, looking at George’s empty chair.
‘He was never a careful boy,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘His feet were very large. His mother knitted his socks for him. That was a great mistake. He thought he was special.’
Frank, who had been loitering by the stairs, wearing a see-through gown, wisped upstairs before she got into full throttle.
‘Who was that girl?’ asked Margaret vaguely, and when we told her it was Frank she sniffed and yelled ‘HA!’ as if she had swotted a fly.
She spoke in a sing-song voice, that soared and dipped. She peeked at George’s old parlour, which was now almost full of her bed, and exclaimed with delight.
Jean was serving up lamb chops made from grated nuts with instant mashed potato and mint sauce, which I had cooked. Aunt Margaret’s eyes glittered, and then she demanded that we say grace, and intoned in a loud voice that we suffered and gave thanks for everything. This lasted several minutes and, by the time she had finished, the dinner was nearly cold.
When Margaret saw my cake she roared with enthusiasm.
‘My Lord!’ she exclaimed. ‘How gifted you are!’
After dinner Aunt Margaret demanded that Jean and I look at her family portrait. We sat awkwardly in a line on the sofa, looking down at a sepia family with straight backs glaring at a trembling photographer. Margaret was seated with her three sisters on a hard sofa. Behind them five brothers arched their spines in tight Bakelite jackets. Either side, their parents, who were Scottish mountains, with glacier hairstyles, loomed, looking harsh and brooding.
Margaret began to cry. Jean went to find some brandy.
‘We were a wonderful family!’ wailed Margaret, clinging to my cheesecloth shirt. ‘Wonderful!’
‘Where are they now?’ I mumbled casually.
Margaret ignored my question.
‘Do you watch television?’ she questioned hotly.
‘Yeah, sometimes,’
‘We used to read Latin and Greek, for amusement.’
‘Oh.’
‘We adored each other.’
I nodded. Margaret wiped her nose on my sleeve.
‘You see, Gert, when the war came everything changed. These boys...’ and her hands shook and she raised them above her head in a hopeless gesture, ‘all died.’
‘Dead?’ I echoed, hopelessly.
‘And for what?’ Margaret lurched to her feet. A misguided tourist was pressing his nose flat against the window. He looked like a frog. Margaret shouted at him and he dipped away.
‘We sent them parcels. We wrote poetry for them. We were left behind, like cliffs.’
Jean reappeared with three glasses of brandy. She was making a cooing, shushing sound with her lips. Together we ushered Margaret back to her seat. She gulped the brandy down in one mouthful. I handed her mine.
‘The letters they wrote were tragic,’ she babbled. ‘Telegrams came. What were we to do? We were ruined. The grief! It was a mountain with no peak. We charged on, angrily. This sister, Eleanor, she was a pilot, and Emily here was the captain of a ship.’
Jean gazed at the row of sisters, fascinated. She looked down woefully at her smooth hands.
Margaret was happy again now, and laughing. ‘And, me, I taught poor, illiterate children to read books.’ She slumped back happily, drinking Jean’s brandy.
‘I’ve even been to tea with the Queen,’ she gurgled, her eyes beginning to close.
‘Margaret has had streets named after her,’ murmured Jean as we transported her large pillowesque body to the bed.
‘Streets, and children. Thank you for having me,’ she added, childishly.
This was a conversation that we had most nights. It became a kind of chant. The portrait was hung on George’s wall, replacing a weather chart. Late at night I heard Margaret speaking to it softly, and I wondered what she made of us, living as we did, like islands in a house with too many doors.
Mr Berry
As I grew up Mr Berry went downhill. For three years we had sat together formally and politely reading our set books and drinking tea together. I had even passed exams. Milton the parrot had aged and had white feathers appearing round his eyes, making him seem owlish. With all the upheaval concerning the disappearance of my father, and the instalment of Aunt Margaret, I had forgotten Mr Berry. Visits to his house had been brief hours of serenity among chaos. Now Margaret was settled I had started to notice him more. Then, for the first time, I met him outside the house. He was sitting on a bench in a public park, not far from the men’s conveniences, and he looked horribly lonely. I sat down beside him. His breath smelt of liquor and fear.
As I joined him he murmured something I couldn’t catch, then fell sideways, onto my lap. I stared down at his tousled head. I knew he would hate himself for this lapse of emotion. A flock of tenors waddled past on their way to chapel; their white surplices pulling them along. Mr Berry was sniffing. He pulled himself upright and wiped his eyes.
‘Sorry Gert,’ he stuttered. Then, ‘You’re lucky, being female, your voice will never break.’
I felt an immediate sense of inadequacy.
Then he got up, like an old codger, and together we stumbled round the cloister, while the choirboys sang in Latin. We stared at the epitaphs on gravestones. It was raining. I was afraid to leave him alone, although he kept straggling away from me. It was quite dark when I finally said good night. Everything was louder and more important than usual. I could even hear the trout swimming down the river.
The next Thursday he opened the door in his dirty dressing gown, with his face unshaven, and my tuition gone from his thoughts. He slumped down into a wooden chair. I could smell the sour excrement of Milton rotting in his unclean cage. The milk had gone off too. Every surface in the house was littered with cigarette ends and empty bottles.
I made him a foul cup of coffee and lost my temper.
‘Look,’ I told him, ‘I’ve got my education to consider. What’s the matter with you?’
He sighed helplessly.
I did the washing up then, which was scummy and unpleasant. I opened the windows which made Mr Berry crouch in the corner of the room as if I was letting the devil in. I put a heap of empty bottles out for the dustman. Then I even washed the kitchen floor and wiped the table. Still he gaped at me with misery and confusion.
I don’t know why I was so fond of Mr Berry. He was a wreck.
On the way out I saw a newspaper torn in shreds lying in the hall. A headline remained – ‘MAN APPREHENDED WITH MINOR IN LAYBY. The boy in question cannot be named...’ I picked up what was left of the sheet and scrumpled it into a hard ball. On the way home I threw it at a swan who hissed back bitterly in moral indignation.
The Post
Dear Ms Hardcastle
We are sorry to have to tell you that you have not been successful in your application for the post of New Archivist at the Archaeological Institute.
We enjoyed meeting you, and wish you luck elsewhere. Please invoice us for any travel expenses you may have incurred.
Yours sincerely
A Working Life
Aunt Margaret wasn’t over-generous with the cash, and we all had to work for a living, apart from Frank who had stopped doing anything but meditating. I became a stacker in an electronics factory, and an artist’s model. Jean was working in a clothes shop, selling silk handkerchiefs and embroidered bras. She loitered about all day listening to blues music and ignoring the customers. She was knitting Aunt Margaret a whimsical shawl from cobwebby wool, in dusty colours. It was so beautiful that people asked if they could buy it, and Jean was dreaming of a price so high that we could buy back the armchairs and the dining table.
The electroni
cs factory was a great random shed filled with sharp floating specks of metal that glistened in rays of sunlight shining through holes in the roof. There were thousands and thousands of boxes filled with intricate parts; washers, screws and wires like worms. We counted out numbers of these unnameable bits and labelled them. I didn’t know what they would become. Perhaps I have touched the insides of submarines, car radios and hoovers. The factory smelt of armpits and cigarettes. There was a round stained clock above our heads whose hands never moved.
Tea break was announced by a wailing hooter and an awesome silence as all the fingers stopped working and the workers queued in a long line for a mug of sweet frothy tea. Our throats were choked up with metallic dust, and I was resented by the big women for being on a temporary contract. They looked as if they might chop me up and put me in bags. Their arms were big enough to pick up the factory en masse and throw it into the Southern sea. I lost patience with this counting of minuscule nuts and bolts and became slapdash; grabbing handfuls of them and chucking them, willy nilly, into boxes and writing ‘one thousand small parts’ on the top.
Standing naked beside a one-bar electric fire was a more lucrative profession, although my hamstrings were heavy with the effort. I was misled at first, thinking that I was posing for portraiture, not life. An art lecturer with a beard of scree told me to take my clothes off. The room was packed with eighteen-year-old youths wearing purple sweaters, and fey young women with beads in their noses. I undressed with unusual difficulty. When I emerged from behind a scanty screen I was sure I could hear cackling. The inept lecturer handled me like a Barbie doll with double-jointed limbs, letting his hands dwell on my upper legs and at the bottom of my back. He left me standing as if I was embracing a pillar, but there was no pillar. Soon the art room was filled with the scraping of charcoal and lead and measuring of my loins from a distance. When there was a coffee break I was often stuck and had to be oiled.
After the session was over some of the young men hung around and made me a cup of coffee. They continued to eye me as if I was still naked. Barefoot, I strolled around the forest of easels, looking at images of great jutting bellies and sacking breasts. My ankles were depicted as huge stumps. Most drawings were from the neck down, but some rare interpretations of my face showed vast mouths and oblong noses. One artist had concentrated on my pubic hair which filled an entire sheet of paper. He made it look verminous. He was one of the ones who made me coffee. His name was Kevin. He said he had a motorbike and would take me to the woods. I was more interested in Heather who had drawn me as a rearing horse.
On payday I had four five-pound notes folded neatly in my velvet purse. My calves were aching from a crouched, naked pose. My hands were pitted with scars from the electronics factory.
I walked beside the foamy river, conjugating the Latin verb to love. Amo Amas Amat. A deep pink light infused everything. There was a scent of roses in the air, and the townsfolk were sitting peaceably on their patios listening to the water spilling along. I stopped to roll a cigarette, watching a swift skimming and darting over the river. In the graveyard the bones were sleeping and for once there were no bells.
In this dusky heaven I relaxed for some time, watching the sky turn azure blue and the river darken to meridian green.
An old man pushing an ancient pram came towards me. He was wrapped up in a festoon of rags and blankets. As he came closer I saw that moss grew on the back of his ancient coat, and newspaper stuck out from the inside of his boots. He was wearing a top hat. Every few minutes he stopped and studied the ground intensely, and then took a small plastic dustpan and brush from the carcass of his pram and diligently swept the pavement. When he came closer I decided to slip away under the shadow of a willow tree, and to head for home.
As I walked away I was sure the man was calling me, but when I turned he was merely speaking to the sky which was now dark velvet blue with angelic stars.
I was strangely disturbed by this incident, and that night I dreamt that I was lying in the pram, and that the tramp was Jean.
Gwenny
Gwenny was back in my flat, making toast. I was sitting in the armchair holding the letter from the museum, feeling like a snail that had lost its shell. There was nothing left to do but drink, and no-one to drink with apart from Gwenny with her clear eyes and hot laugh. That day I had been out searching for the mummy. I had wandered around the city skips, hoping to find her royal toes sticking out of the piles of builders’ debris. I went to a street that was heavy with gun smoke and motorbike fumes and wandered in and out of long thin shops with old garnished men who sat sucking gum and drinking tea from tin mugs. I told them I would pay good money. They didn’t answer. I stumbled through wastelands of scrap cars, and down back alleys where sodden dolls lay broken on the cobbles and half-eaten prams were carcasses waiting for vultures. Alsations threatened me from the other side of walls laced with glass. I stopped a gang of children in a street. They had saucers for eyes and hollow cheeks. Behind them in doorways tiny Indian girls in bright saris stared at me as if I was a social worker. I asked them if they had ever been to the municipal museum. They shook their heads, and gazed at me open mouthed.
‘I’ve lost something very important!’ I wailed.
‘What’s that? Is it your cat?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’ blurted another with a long mouth and a small jacket.
‘Do you know what a mummy is?’ I whispered.
‘You’ve lost your mummy?’
They laughed then, like baby birds, and then scattered, running in all directions, leaving me feeling lonelier than I have ever felt before.
Gwenny looked at me as if I was a broken piece of furniture that she was about to mend. My body was heavy with whiskey. I looked at her and shrugged. She rolled up her sleeves and opened the window wide, so that a confetti of scraps of paper swirled around the room and light streamed in defiantly.
‘Why don’t we get out of here?’ said Gwenny suddenly. ‘You and me.’
The Debt
I was having a short back and sides at the barber’s. The room was powder blue and smelt of surgical spirit and old men’s whiskers. A row of men were looking at me as if I was a dangerous type of profligate weed that was growing unchecked through the flower beds of Britain. I was wearing one of George’s dinner suits, which was so large it made me look as if I worked in the circus. The barber was grumbling and wielding his whirring blade with ill-temper. He said I’d be better off having a perm at Veronica’s salon over the road. He had short plump fingers and a bald head. He spat on his metal comb. Above the basins was a pornographic calendar showing a young woman with breasts as big as footballs. Her tongue lolled out as if she was thirsty. The barber whizzed dangerously close to my ear. The tiled floor was covered with my hippy hair. A boy with an angelic face was sweeping up the curls. He winked at my reflection in the glass, and patted his own close shave as if we were comrades.
‘Shorter!’ I ordered firmly when the barber grudgingly held a mirror up to the back of my head. He growled and attacked me again with his fine scissors, while outside a bishop’s wife with a coiffure the height of an ornamental bush pointed me out to her lean friend who was dressed in a white trouser suit. I pulled a face at them, imitating the lewd look of the girl in the calendar, and they shuddered and moved away.
That’s when the tramp in the top hat appeared, pressing his face against the barber’s window. He parked his pram firmly on the pavement and walked into the barber’s shop. The other customers held their noses and grimaced.
The tramp removed his hat and bowed to the assembled clients. Some blackened cinders dropped out of his matted grey hair. He mumbled greetings with lavish sweeps of his fingerless gloves. His presence seemed to fill the small busy room.
The barber glanced up, then washed his hands and dried them on a clean towel, with a harassed expression.
‘I would like a shave,’ announced the tramp in a refined Scottish voice. There was something fa
miliar about him.
‘I’m sorry, we’re busy,’ cut the barber, stroking his shining pate, not looking. The tramp shrugged. The barber was rubbing gel into my sleek new hairdo, chuntering on about ne’er-do-wells and the state of the streets.
The tramp peeled off his coat.
Underneath he was much smaller.
‘Looks like you could do with a haircut,’ commented the cherubic boy with the broom.
The tramp nodded sadly.
‘I said I’m busy,’ snorted the barber, brushing me down roughly.
‘I could cut his hair,’ said the boy. ‘If that’s all right with you Mr Fan.’
The barber looked up at the bulging breasts, as if asking for inspiration.
‘Go on then,’ he sighed wearily. ‘He’s not qualified,’ he added mercilessly to the tramp, who was sitting down on the red leather chair, and allowing the beautiful boy to tuck a towel around his neck.
The tramp blinked understandingly. I watched the boy take a large pair of scissors and begin to cut away the thicket of hair that obscured the tramp’s face. The barber handed me my coat.
That’s when I realized who it was.
I walked quietly up to the boy who was whistling happily and cutting hair as if he was a prince hacking down a thorny forest.
Henry met my eyes in the mirror and smiled politely. She didn’t recognize me.
‘We’ve met.’
‘Ah,’ agreed Henry, frowning.
‘In Glasgow. You were on your way to Muck.’
‘I see,’ she murmured, as the boy tenderly brushed away the stray hairs that had fallen over her blue eyes.
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