The rumble of their dialogue was lulling, melancholy, remote. Then someone was running a bath; unfamiliar pipes groaned and eased too near at hand. There were no curtains at my window yet. In the dark I missed the view from my old room intensely, and I didn’t want to think about the non-trees I had conjured into being.
We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer – we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.
I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence as if I were taking soundings. Sometimes Madeleine and I were experimentally raucous, clattering and screaming, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safe keeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste by which to judge what was there (wood veneer, streamlined forms, tapering peg-legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves); and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright brisk statement, their light and order which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.
Gerry’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed – nor when I added new nicks in the years afterwards, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I had washed up after my sugar-messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking stuck around the bottom of the pan.
— She’s got to learn, Gerry said. — She’s not a baby any longer.
I was clumsy, easily distracted, I was ‘always in a dream’. Gerry dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Gerry’s jokes. I lost my door key or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Gerry rarely lost his temper with me; not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.
And of course days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Gerry and I climbed the
We moved just before the beginning of the summer holidays. (I had one year left of junior school.) Madeleine and I were bound to become friends over that summer – we had nothing else to do. During the holidays in the past, when Mum went to work I was left at Nana’s or at Auntie Jean’s. Now (Nana wasn’t capable any longer and Gerry didn’t like Jean) I stayed at home, under the supervision of Madeleine’s mother Pam, who offered because it meant that Madeleine had someone to play with. Pam was cheerfully casual and didn’t bother us; she sometimes took us swimming. I think she felt sorry for me, left all alone, but actually I was relieved to have the house to myself. Mum left paste sandwiches and crisps and Penguins in the fridge. Madeleine watched me eat, sliding her feet under the kitchen table and hanging from its edge like a monkey: for a tubby girl she was unexpectedly flexible, turning cartwheels easily and walking on her hands. There was no one to stop me beginning with chocolate and finishing with my sandwiches stuffed with crisps. I gulped milk from the bottle, wiping its creamy moustache on to my sleeve; I cooked up messes of butter and sugar in a pan.
I moved around the new house in the adults’ absence as if I were taking soundings. Sometimes Madeleine and I were experimentally raucous, clattering and screaming, flying down the stairs two or three at a time. The house’s air, one moment after we’d shattered it, was blandly restored. I picked up ornaments, poked in the miscellany of small things that had been put inside them for safe keeping, opened drawers. I had no criteria of taste by which to judge what was there (wood veneer, streamlined forms, tapering peg-legs, fitted carpets, a television inside a cabinet with doors, curtains with a print of autumn leaves); and so I felt the impact of the rooms purely, their bright brisk statement, their light and order which aspired to weightlessness and dustlessness.
Gerry’s desk drawers were boring, full of papers having to do with dull mysteries: mortgages and insurance. With a kitchen knife I made a tiny nick in the wood at the back of the kneehole in the desk, near the floor. I was filled with trepidation next time he sat down to do the accounts and pay the bills, but he never noticed – nor when I added new nicks in the years afterwards, every time I was most incandescently angry with him. He did notice that I had been through his drawers, and also that we had bounced on the sofa, rucking the covers and denting the cushions. And although I had washed up after my sugar-messes, like forensic scientists he and Mum somehow discovered traces of my cooking stuck around the bottom of the pan.
— She’s got to learn, Gerry said. — She’s not a baby any longer.
I was clumsy, easily distracted, I was ‘always in a dream’. Gerry dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard. I wasn’t pretty or charming or malleable. I went around with a suffering face. I read my book with my fingers in my ears. I wouldn’t laugh at Gerry’s jokes. I lost my door key or I went out with Madeleine leaving the back door unlocked. I left the hot tap running in the bathroom, then I forgot my cardigan at the swimming pool. Gerry rarely lost his temper with me; not in that early time. He never, ever hit me.
And of course days passed, even weeks sometimes, when he and I weren’t in any sort of outright conflict. Sometimes we were even all right together. Once, when he and Mum both had time off work, we went out for the day to Brean Down and Gerry and I climbed the
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