Living In Perhaps (21 page)

'Mr Clipper will wonder where you are.
Mrs
Clipper will be
distraught,' Tom said, and they both laughed. Laughed inordinately,
lying flat on the floor with only their heads tipped up
at a painful angle, rested against the bed. I could see Tom's bony
ribs heaving up and down under his rucked-up T-shirt. I stepped
over Tom Rose's legs and went out.

The stairs were a problem, see-sawing away into the distance,
terribly long and steep. I held on to the banister rail with one
hand and the wall with the other, and levered myself down, like a
person on crutches. I had to push past a woman in a silver dress
who was sitting on the stairs, jabbering into the telephone, and a
man and a woman who were embracing. As I squeezed past I had
to put both my arms around the man's back to steady them and
myself.

'Oh, what's this?' said the man. 'Come on, sweetheart, the more
the ...'

I felt stupid and red-faced, and then it was over, I was through,
and the front door was ahead of me, open. The deep blue, scented
night. As I crossed the veranda the music downstairs stopped, and
I could hear Tom and Tom Rose's voices from above, yelping out
over the evening air, laughing, and howling like demented dogs.

No one was interested in how late I was. I think this time they'd
forgotten all about me. I found Mum and Dad and Brian standing
on the back lawn, in the full flood of light from the French
windows, looking up at the strange glow thrown by flames above
the hedge. Grey smoke blossoming up into the navy-blue sky, and
burning sparks that shot madly up, darting and spiralling like
houseflies, and turned into charred flakes which floated down,
graceful and calm. Perhaps I should have noticed the smoky smell
in the air when I came out of the Hennessys' house. Perhaps I
should have realized that the excited voices weren't just party
voices. I was more concerned about walking straight and looking
normal. About not puking into the roses. But no one even glanced
at me.

'I wondered where you all were,' I said, trying to imply that I
had been indoors for some time. 'What's going on?'

'More than a bonfire,' my father said, shortly. He sounded cross
but the look on his face was triumphant.

'Maybe it's their summer house,' I said. 'Their garden shed. I
mean, everyone has a shed. Don't they?'

'I suppose we'll have the fire brigade up here next,' my mother
said. 'Though how they'll get through all those ...'

We stood motionless, our heads tilted upwards. No more
sparks flew up. The billow of smoke dwindled.

'Just keeping an eye on
our
shed,' my father said, looking back
at me for the first time. He wore a weary cynic's expression now,
as if he had to put up with neighbourhood riots every Saturday
night. 'Making sure one of those sparks doesn't catch the roof
alight. You go in. We can all go in now.'

We moved off slowly, Brian leading the way, his hands in his
pockets, kicking a snail shell up the lawn.

That night the Hennessys' old summer house burned to the
ground. It was assumed that a spark from the coals where Patrick
was roasting half a pig had set it off.

Actually, it was Brian.

The day after the party we had Aunt Gloria to tea. My mother,
with great bags under her eyes and a drawn expression which
could have been removed if she had wished to, complained about
the noise the previous night. 'No respect. No respect for other
people at all,' she kept repeating.

But Gloria, most unsatisfactorily, only responded with 'The
Crown and Anchor on the corner gets noisy some nights. Fridays
and Saturdays, in particular. And the customers, going home! You
can hear them all the way up the street.' Which wasn't what my
mother wanted to hear at all.

While Gloria entertained the folks, I slipped next door for half
an hour. The Hennessys were still tidying up. The smell of smoke
and stale beer hung round the house. Tillie, in her jeans and a
crumpled shirt, looking more bedraggled than usual, was stacking
empty bottles in a cardboard box outside the front door. 'They're
out the back,' she said to me. 'And Patrick's snoozing on the sofa.
He's feeling a bit fragile, so I'd appreciate it if you'd be quiet.'

I should have taken that phrase and presented it in a jewelled
box to my mother. It would have proved beyond doubt her belief
in the hypocrisy of the rest of the world. She could have lifted the
lid every so often, as with a little musical box, and listened to
the phrase, and gloated.

In the back garden I saw that the summer house was nothing
more than a heap of damp black charcoal. Mattie and Sebastian
had taken bits of it and were drawing rude cartoons on the paving
stones. Isolde was sweeping cigarette ends and other debris from
the back veranda. She gave me a 'What did you expect?' kind of
shrug as I passed. Pickles was sniffing curiously at the path of her
broom.

I found Tom sitting under an apple tree, eating cold leftovers. I
sat down a quarter turn around from him, so that I could rest my
back against the tree trunk, too. He passed me his beer bottle, and
I took a swig. Here was my looking-glass life, the other side of the
hedge, where people treated me casually, where I knew a boy, and
drank beer. It was so weird that I turned into this other person
when I crossed the boundary between there and here. Or was it
that
they
turned me into another person, and my family, when I
went home, turned me back?

'How did it happen?'

'Patrick and his medieval barbecue.'

Tom flicked his hand towards a coal pit where the end posts to
support the spit-roast arrangement still stood. 'No one was paying
it too much attention, and I think a bit must have flown up
and caught the timbers of the shed.'

'Was anything lost?'

'Some tools and wood. No Leonardos, if that's what you mean.
Eugene put it out.'

'
Eugene?
'

'Yeah, Eugene got the fire extinguisher Tillie keeps under the
stairs. She keeps it in case the house goes up in flames, and all her
precious pictures with it.'

I scrambled round to face Tom. 'I didn't know
Eugene
was
here!'

Eugene had been somewhere in that thrumming crowd and I
hadn't even suspected it.

'Yeah.' Tom sounded totally unconcerned. 'He wouldn't miss a
party. Came up with his new girlfriend, Tamara.' He fell silent,
looking down at the greasy plate in his lap, and there was something
about the way he'd said her name that made me think he
was silent in order to contemplate the image of Tamara.

'Is he still here?'

'Nah. Left this morning. Couldn't wait to get back to the
Smoke. Doesn't like yokel life.'

'Do
we
?'

'Not much, but what can we do?' He sighed, and tipped the
beer bottle right up, catching the last drops in his open mouth. I
looked at the uncouth outline of his throat.

'I can't believe Eugene was here,' I said.

I never really believed in Eugene. I'd needed proof, and there
was none. I thought of the monkey-baby in the painting. Now he
was grown up, with delectable girlfriends. He was older than the
others, a legendary sibling. Eugene had put the fire out in
the summer house. Eugene was there and I had missed him.
Eugene was the Invisible Man.

Barbara came back from her overnight stay with dyed hair. She
and the friend (a girl I didn't know) had coloured it over the bathroom
sink. It was dark red, a burnished red, eye-catching, but it
didn't go with her complexion. The following evening we sat on
her bed and worked our way through a stack of magazines she'd
brought from the friend's house:
Honey
,
Nineteen
, even
Vogue
.
She flipped pages, looking critically at skinny, soft-focus girls with
huge eyes and blank expressions.

'How come Eugene is much older than the rest of you?' I asked.
'What was Tillie doing? She could have painted then, when she
only had him.'

'Oh, she had two other babies after him,' Barbara said, offhandedly,
not looking up from her article. 'But they died. They
both had something wrong with them and they died just after
they were born. Or they died before they were born. In the womb.
I can't remember exactly.' She flipped another page.

I was shocked. Poor Tillie. And to keep on trying, so many times.

'It was lucky the rest of you were all right, then,' I said.

She looked up. 'Are we?'

What if Tillie, to make up for those poor lost babies, had decided
to adopt? Had decided to adopt a replacement to fill the aching
void in her heart? What if they had chosen
me
from the children's
home? I could have grown up with Tillie as my mother. I wonder
how much would have been the same, and how much that has
happened would never have happened, in those circumstances?

Well, it's no good thinking about
what if
.

As my aunt Gloria would say, 'It doesn't bear thinking about.'

Hanny Gombrich doesn't drink milk or eat any dairy foods. She
told me she is allergic to them. I asked her how she knew.

'It gives me a rash. Anything dairy.'

'So what do you do?'

'They're supposed to be careful with my diet here, but they're
not
that
careful. I think if they can't be bothered they just slop it
all in. And I get a reaction.'

'Even to chocolate?'

'Of course to chocolate!'

'It's not just something you don't want to eat, then?'

'No!' She sounded most offended. 'Look, I'll prove it. Even if I
don't know something's dairy, it still has an effect.'

She pushed back one sleeve to demonstrate.

'This is an old bit of eczema,' she said. 'The redness has faded
but you can still
feel
where it was. It's from something milky in a
sauce last week.'

She grabbed my hand and pressed it on to the skin of her forearm.
It was true, it felt rough and dry, like you imagine a lizard's
skin would feel. I took my hand away quickly, but she left her
sleeve rolled back. Exposed like that, her inner arm was a basket-weave
of delicate scars, more than I had seen before, more than
she had showed me. She must have tried a lot of times.

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.

Today, under her tapestry coat, she was wearing black crushedvelvet
trousers and genuine American cowboy boots. Bought
when she was genuinely in America. Hanny has been all over the
world.

I, by contrast, have never been anywhere. Our family didn't go
away for holidays like other families did. If asked by some wellmeaning
neighbour, my parents would say, 'We're staying at home
this year,' as if all the other years we had spent the fortnight in a
caravan at Morecambe Bay or a cliff-top hotel in Cornwall. 'We're
having
days out
.' Oh, days out.

Days out were purgatory. My mother would make us a picnic
lunch, and pack it in transparent boxes that reeked of plastic and
made the food taste of plastic. We had sandwiches and orange
squash, and thermos flasks of tea, and bananas which putrefied
inside their skins before the journey was halfway over. We took a
blanket to sit on, and plastic macs in case it rained. And a camera
to take a photograph of us having fun. To cap it all, Brian would
sit in the front of the car. Mum sat next to Dad on the way there,
and then on the way home – 'Fancy a change? All change!' my
father would say – down Brian would plump into the space and
comfort of the front seat, as if it was his God-given right. 'That's
it. Ladies in the back. Just like driving the Queen.'

I think they liked it, men together, steering and navigating, in
control of the car. I never sat in the front. Mum and I squashed
into the back seat, in opposite corners, the picnic paraphernalia
between us, our feet crammed into the narrow leg-space, not talking.
It was always noisy in the back. We could hear Brian's and
Dad's voices but we couldn't necessarily hear what they said. I
stared out of the side window, or round Dad's head, but mostly
at
his head, the misty brown prickles of his short-back-and-sides,
the waxy pink of his bald spot, the curious rolls of fat (and yet he
wasn't
fat
) where his neck met his collar. I wanted to see the open
road, the rolling landscape, but all I got was the whirling grass
verge and a view of the back of his head.

We went to places like some forlorn field indistinguishable
from any other field, or a small hilltop – hilltops being few and far
between in our part of the country and therefore thrilling. We
liked a nice view. Sometimes we looked round an old church, or
went to a stately home which had an open day. Very occasionally
we went to the sea, but my parents, like a lot of people who have
grown up in coastal towns, despised resorts and the trippers they
attracted, and if we went anywhere near the water it was to bleak
reaches of tide and shingle, acres of blade-like grass and piercing
winds.

But the Hennessys, oh, the Hennessys did it differently. Of
course they did. Once I went round in all my innocence, on the
first day of the school holidays, anticipating endless time together,
only to find that Barbara had already left. Flown the coop, hadn't
told me a thing. This was early on, this was one of the first
surprises, the sudden blows she delivered to me.

'Oh, she's gone away,' Sebastian said, hanging upside down by
his arms from the veranda rail. His mouth hung open and his
curly hair streamed towards the earth. 'She's gone to London with
Isolde.'

This simple statement disorientated me as much as his face, the
wrong way up. If he'd told me she'd been transported to Botany
Bay I wouldn't have been more shocked. How did people just go?
There must have been planning, packing, some thought beforehand.
Some intimation of sudden departure. In our house even
days out were planned for in detail, like a general drawing up
his campaign strategy, taking all intelligence into account.
Preparations were visible. But no, Barbara and Isolde had just
taken off, like will-o'-the-wisps, like thieves in the night. Stolen
away from me.

Or it might be to Devon, to Malvern, to Scotland, to Rome. I
found that one or another Hennessy was always zooming off, at a
moment's notice, to stay with someone's godmother or Patrick's
half-brother or Tillie's old friend from art school. Tillie's extended
family might all have died due to the Nazi occupation but
Patrick's relations well made up for it. Hennessys, as I might have
known, had a wealth of relations sprinkled across the globe, only
too anxious to invite and entertain them, and a superfluity of
friends just waiting to make them at home.

They went by train and car and sometimes even plane, in pairs
and alone, on exotic adventures with fluid schedules and ever-shifting
itineraries. Once when Barbara went to Paris to stay with
someone I'd never heard mentioned before, called Joan (not a
French name, I thought, in spite of Joan of Arc), I was told, 'She'll
be back on Monday.' But when Monday came I learned she'd been
despatched to Annecy to visit someone else. Annecy, I was told,
had a beautiful lake and a very good climate. All very well, I
thought, but why was Barbara in need of them?

Even Mr and Mrs Van Hoog went away every year for two
weeks in the Lake District. They liked the mountains and the
water. They always sent a postcard back, of Dove Cottage or
Windermere or maybe just an unnamed misty island floating on
a lake. I imagined them in their insect-like car, driving carefully
down winding lanes, and stopping at recognized beauty spots to
admire the view and then study the next leg on the map.

The exception was Tillie. Tillie never zoomed off anywhere.
She didn't seem to need to visit London, or Dublin, or Paris.
She barely even went to the shops down the road. Tillie stayed at
home, as if she was the very necessary household god, the little
deity of the hearth, the
genius loci
, without whom none of it could
survive intact, or even exist.