‘Well, just a little then,’ I said. The cheese was pungent with soft threads of mould. I didn’t like it much although I couldn’t help eating because I was hungry, and also because I was nervous. The bread was both damp and stale.
The kettle boiled, and I made the tea, watching out of the corner of my eye as he shaved. He lit a candle and then set up a round mirror with a china stand on top of his box. He added a splash of hot water from the kettle to his basin of cold water and tested it with a fingertip. He knelt before the mirror, put a white towel round his shoulders and lathered his face with a soapy brush before sliding a silver blade over his cheeks and chin. I winced as he stretched his neck back and slid the blade up his throat from his Adam’s apple to his jaw. I noticed the curved sharpness of his fingernails, like manicured nails, perfect little blades themselves. There was the faintest soapy scraping sound and then the dabbling as he dipped the blade in the water before wiping it clean on the towel between strokes. I had never seen anyone except Bob shave before, and he used an electric razor that buzzed like a demented bee. It was an intimate thing to see, the deftness and delicacy with which Johnny shaved, touching himself tenderly, almost lovingly. Finally he splashed his face with water and rubbed it with the towel. Then he smiled at me, his face pink and shining.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Almost human again now.’ I handed him his tea. He looked closely at me for the first time. His eyes had a colour that day, a smoky grey, but they were strange and blank and piercing. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look.’ He gestured to the mirror. I knelt down and glimpsed my reflection. I’d forgotten all about the lipstick. It was smudged and smeared round my mouth like dried blood. ‘Not much of an improvement if you don’t mind me saying,’ he said. Then, ‘Come here.’
I stood up and went towards him. He dipped the corner of his towel in the soapy water and wiped my lips, his hand cupped behind my head. He pressed so hard that it hurt slightly, and I could taste the soap between my lips. A new feeling ran like a warmth from my mouth right down into my belly, a yearning that had started when I saw the way he touched his own face.
‘Where’s the lipstick?’ he asked. I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He unscrewed the top and wound up the solid greasy tongue, then he licked it over my lips, moving it precisely round the contours of my mouth. ‘Now look.’ I stooped and saw my face, just the same, a child’s pale face but with the voluptuous lips of a woman. I smiled at myself and then at him, and it was a smile with a different meaning.
He watched me for a moment, and then turned away. ‘It’ll take you a few years to grow into those lips,’ he said. ‘You’d better watch it till then. Now run off home to your mother.’
‘Can’t I help you?’ I asked.
‘Not today.’ He began tidying up his things, went to the door and flung the soapy water away so that it made a long grey arc in the air before sploshing over a gravestone.
‘Did you know that this isn’t a real church?’ I asked him.
‘What do you mean “real”?’
‘Not consecrated.’
‘What difference does that make? So some pompous fool hasn’t muttered magic spells in it, that’s all. Makes no odds to me. It’s still bricks and mortar. Still a roof.’
‘But that’s all it is. It’s no more than a house, or a warehouse. It’s not holy.’ I licked my slippery lips, I wanted him to look at me, but he kept his eyes turned away.
‘I didn’t think you believed in anything.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Then what does “holy” mean for Christ’s sake?’
‘It’s what other people believe in,’ I said. He gave an exasperated laugh. ‘I wrote a poem at school,’ I said, willing him to look at me, wanting him to take me seriously. ‘A good poem about angels, but not holy angels.’
He stood looking out of the door with his back to me. ‘What kind of angels?’ he asked.
‘Just creatures from the sky.’
‘What manner of creatures from the sky?’
‘Something like rooks and something like women.’
He stood aside from the door and looked at me at last, but obliquely. ‘Are you a poet then?’
‘I mean to be,’ I said, though it was the first time the thought had even entered my head. I wanted to interest him.
‘You should know that angels are hermaphrodites,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Both man and woman.’
‘Like snails?’
‘You should wipe that muck off your face until you’ve grown up a bit,’ Johnny said, his voice harsh. ‘And I don’t want to see you like that again. You’re a child, you’re supposed to be a child.’ He pushed past me quite violently and began slamming things into his suitcase.
‘I’d better be going,’ I said.
‘If you know what’s good for you.’
‘I’ll return your book another day,’ I said, nearing the door.
‘Book? Oh …’ his voice trailed away vaguely, as if I had already gone, and I picked up my shopping bag and walked home. He had changed. The way he spoke had changed. As if he was acting before, or maybe not. Maybe the harsher Johnny was real. There was a little tremor inside me, a fluttering, not unpleasant, a frisson of fear. As I left the church behind I felt something else too. I felt disappointed, as if someone had snatched something away from under my nose.
11
‘Jennifer!’ Mama darted out into the hall to meet me. ‘Oh …’ She stopped when she saw my lips and made a little fretting sound in her throat.
‘I’ll just take my presents upstairs,’ I said.
‘I’ll find you some wrapping paper presently,’ she called after me.
From my bedroom I could tell they were talking about the lipstick. I crept down the stairs. ‘Her mother all over again,’ I thought I heard Bob say, and I smiled. Serve them right, I thought. They didn’t say anything about it to me at all. I ate my potato – withered from being kept hot for so long – standing up in the kitchen. And then I went into the sitting room and slumped into a chair. Bob didn’t look up from his crossword. I felt strange and wild and scornful.
‘Would you like to help me?’ Mama asked. She had sheets of coloured paper spread out all over the table and the carpet.
‘Help you do what?’
‘I’m making a nativity scene.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘For Christmas, a decoration.’
‘No one’s going to see it. What’s the point?’
‘There’s us, and Auntie May. Do try and get rid of that expression Ja … Jennifer, you’ll age so badly if you cultivate a frown.’ Her voice had taken on a sharp edge, but when I flicked a look at her, she forced the corners of her mouth into an upward curve. ‘My goodness you smell of smoke. It’s a scandal the way they smoke on the buses.’ She switched her attention to Bob. ‘Jennifer was asking about the church in the old cemetery,’ she said. ‘I’m right in thinking it never was a proper church, aren’t I? I said to Jenny that she must ask you, that you’re the one with the memory.’
Bob cleared his throat. ‘That’s an interesting question,’ he began and my heart sank, for this signalled a lecture. ‘The land was originally consecrated in the 1830s but there was subsequently a problem with the consecration of the building itself, which I believe I’m right in saying was never ultimately completed.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘But as I was going on to say …’
‘It doesn’t matter. That’s all I wanted to know.’
‘Jennifer … there’s no need to be rude. Bob was only trying to …’
‘I know.’
‘Off the rails,’ muttered Bob. He went back to his crossword, trying to work out an anagram on the margin of the page. Mama bent her head over her piece of folded paper. ‘Did Jacqueline help you with your origami?’ I asked.
Bob made a sound as if he’d been winded, rustled his ne
wspaper fiercely, and tapped his pen several times on the arm of his chair. Mama pressed her lips together until they were white before replying: ‘I hadn’t taken it up then. She crocheted though, lovely crochet, so I dare say she would have done.’
I looked at the sideboard with its set of crocheted mats, one long oval and two smaller circles. ‘Yes.’ Mama answered my unasked question. ‘Jacqueline did those.’ I got up and examined the mats for the first time. They had always been there, but I’d never taken any notice before. They were made of a cream-coloured silky thread, patterns like flowers linked together on a fine mesh. I could never imagine myself doing anything like that, anything so delicate.
I sat down again. There was a fragile silence and then the triumphant sound of Bob filling in an answer. Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Old copper receptacle of certain friars? Lilian, what do you think?’
‘Stars are simple,’ Mama said to me. ‘Watch.’ She began to fold and pinch and crease a sheet of paper, turning it over and demonstrating the technique. Her fingers were quick and clever, as Jacqueline’s must have been. She must have sat just where I was sitting, between Mama and Bob, conjuring with her crochet hook.
I tried to fold a star, but I was never any good at fiddly things. My folds and creases were ill-defined, I could never manage a sharp crease. But I made a few second-rate attempts. Mama snipped at a piece of paper. ‘I’m cheating now,’ she confided. ‘In true origami you never use scissors, it’s all in the folding. It’s thought of as art in Japan, you know.’
I looked at Bob’s legs and feet. His calves were hairy and webbed with purple lines and the soft protuberances of varicose veins, and marked as if splashed with the stains of ancient bruises. His feet were long and warped, the toenails curved and yellow, thick as horn. On each of his toes was a patch of straggly hair, getting less as his toes got smaller until on each of the little toes there were only one or two. I had taken to staring at him sometimes, a bit of him at a time, though never looking quite at his giblets. I knew my scrutiny made him uncomfortable. He’d flick me a puzzled, wounded look now and then, and shuffle uneasily, and I was glad. He was hurt that I would no longer take part in the daily dozen. They no longer even called me. I’d wait in the mornings for the thumping to cease before I got out of bed. Now, he ignored me, hiding himself behind the newspaper.
‘Twins sit clad in tatters. Eight letters,’ he said. ‘Any idea, Lilian?’
‘Why doesn’t he get dressed?’ I asked Mama. There was another silence and in the silence I experienced a strange creeping sensation, almost as if I was growing, growing as big as Alice squashed into the rabbit’s house, so big that I could not take seriously these mannikins with their puzzles and their folded paper. Bob got up suddenly and knocked the table with his clumsy foot and the paper donkey Mama had just completed fell to the floor and was trodden underfoot as he left the room. He banged the door as he went out, causing the clock to emit a timid chime.
Mama picked up her ruined donkey and tried to smooth it out. She said not a word but looked at me reproachfully.
‘Well why doesn’t he?’ I insisted. ‘Doesn’t he know how … how grotesque he looks?’ I shouted to be sure that Bob would hear me, wherever he was skulking.
She picked up another piece of paper and began folding. I stood up. I felt as if I was looking down on her from some immense height, dwarfish thing that she was, pinching the paper with her bony fingers into tiny folds, sharp enough to slice her skin.
‘I’m going out,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘Don’t know. Might go to Bronwyn’s.’ I went out quickly, grabbing my coat as I went. I was frightened of the anger swirling inside me like trapped rubbish in a gale. I was frightened to let it out. I ran down the road. It was a cold afternoon, darkening already. I thought longingly of the playground. I could not go there now, because of the darkness, and because of Johnny, who might well be mad. That would explain why he lived in the church although he was not an ordinary tramp, but a well-read man who shaved with a silver blade. I paused to light a cigarette, cupping my hand round the flame of the match, and drawing the smoke deep into my lungs. I imagined my lungs revealed like the lungs on the diagram in the science room at school, two pink spongy embryonic wings, filling now with tobacco smoke, fading to grey. Johnny didn’t smoke, at least I had never seen him smoke, but he did drink a lot of whisky so that his innards would be stained brown. All the innocent baby pink of our lungs and curled intestines were gone to brown and grey like Mama’s hair or the bruisy stains on Bob’s shins. Under the street lamps my own skin was grey. I splayed my fingers, grey skin over grey bones. My great body shrunk around me like a shrinking coat and a brightness fled from me as I scurried smokily along.
I went to Bronwyn’s house for want of anything better to do. I thought again of the playground, but the creature who had swung in the sparkling sunshine was a stranger to me now. Bronwyn opened the door and drew me inside. ‘I was so bored,’ she exclaimed, ‘you must have read my mind.’
‘I was just passing,’ I said.
‘You’re wearing lipstick!’ she said admiringly, and touched it with her finger. ‘Have you brought it with you? Can I have some?’ She led me upstairs to her room, sat in front of her mirror, and held out her hand for the lipstick. I watched the way her eyes became dreamy as her lips darkened. When she’d finished, she blotted her mouth expertly on a handkerchief and held the blurry butterfly shape up for me to see. Then she turned and pouted. She fluffed out her hair and blew kisses at me, and then at herself in the mirror, until the grayness inside me let up a bit and I smiled, and even felt the first tickly edge of a laugh.
‘I know!’ she said. She took off her cardigan and then unbuttoned her blouse so that I could see her big grey brassiere. Then she pressed her elbows against the sides of her breasts so that they rose into a shadowy crease and paraded round the room like that, waggling her hips and tossing her head and blowing maroon kisses into the air.
‘Oh I’d love to do it,’ she sighed, suddenly flopping down onto the bed with her skirt all up exposing her solid mottly thighs.
‘What?’
‘It.’
I had a book at home which Mama had given me about pond life. The centre pages showed the life cycle of the frog: first the spawn, then the tadpoles, then the tiny frogs. But before the spawn there was fertilization. This took three hours, I thought, three hours of cold froggy embrace, clammy frog sex organs jammed crampily together. It sounded terrible, but I knew it couldn’t be, for if it was where would the temptation be?
‘Angels are hermaphrodites,’ I told her.
‘Are what?’
‘Both man and woman.’
‘Don’t be daft!’
‘They are.’
‘How can they be? I don’t believe you!’ She giggled. ‘Go on then, draw one.’ She gave me a pencil and opened the back of an exercise book.
‘I can’t,’ I said, and then I giggled too, just as if I had changed into a child again. I drew wings and an angel’s face and breasts.
‘And a penis,’ Bronwyn ordered. ‘Go on, draw a penis.’
I drew a little dangly thing. ‘That’s no good,’ she said. ‘Do a bigger one.’
‘Do it yourself.’
‘I can’t draw! Go on …’
I did another version, more explicit than angelic, and she brought her hand up to her mouth and shrieked with glee. ‘Like a horse!’
‘Bronwyn …’ Mrs Broom’s voice sounded from downstairs. ‘What are you up to up there?’
‘Jenny’s here,’ Bronwyn replied. ‘We’ll be down in a minute.’ She took a last look at the angels and then closed the book. She fastened her blouse and we went down into the warm baking-smell of the kitchen.
‘Hello dear,’ Mrs Broom said, ‘I didn’t realize you were here.’ She looked at my lips and then Bronwyn’s. There was a little fluttering at her temple. ‘Be good girls and go and wash that off.’
‘In a minute,
Mum,’ Bronwyn said. ‘No one’s going to see.’ Mrs Broom shifted from one foot to the other and wrung her hands together as if there was something terrible in the room with us, not just four smears of coloured grease. ‘Jennifer’s going to help me ice the buns,’ Bronwyn persuaded.
‘Oh all right then.’ Mrs Broom turned away from our faces and back to her work. There were long strips of white pastry spread out on the table. She took handfuls of pink sausage meat between her palms and rolled them with a licking sound into long pieces like skinned snakes. Then she flipped the pastry over and stuck it down with beaten egg and chopped it into little pieces.
‘That’s a lot of sausage rolls,’ I said.
‘It’s for the bazaar. The church Christmas bazaar. Monday evening. One hundred. And Bronwyn’s in charge of the buns.’
The buns sat in rows on the side, each in its own fluted paper case. ‘I’ll put the icing on and you can sprinkle on the hundreds and thousands,’ Bronwyn said, and we set to work on the buns, while the sausage rolls were baking. It was cosy in the kitchen with the sausagey smell emanating from the oven, the stickiness of glacé icing to lick off our fingers.
‘Don’t do them all the same,’ Mrs Broom said. ‘Put some cherries on some of them.’
‘Why don’t you come to the bazaar?’ Bronwyn asked me. ‘After school on Monday?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Go on …’ Bronwyn urged. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘You’d be most welcome,’ Bronwyn’s mother said, as she took the first batch of sausage rolls from the oven, little golden brown bundles, the meat stretched out from each end with the heat. I eyed them greedily.
‘Go on then,’ Mrs Broom said, and held the tray out to me, and I took one and tossed it up and down until it was cool enough to eat.
‘Don’t burn your mouth! We’re getting the baking done today because tomorrow’s Sunday,’ Mrs Broom explained.
‘Day of rest,’ explained Bronwyn and mimed a pious prayer behind her mother’s back.
‘Are your family church-goers?’ Mrs Broom asked.
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