Read Online The Cornflake House by Deborah Gregory - Free Book Online Page B

to explain this attraction? It’s you, Matthew, the whole you, I’ve fallen for. That cleanliness, that care, attention to detail, I find it simply melts me. Maybe you’ll never fully understand, you’d need not only to stand back from your own self, to look with my eyes at the neat, appealing man opposite me, but also to go backwards, to step inside my old life in an impossible way. Imagine being one of seven children, one of whom was seriously deranged, for a start. Think of the noise, the constant cries, discordant music, slamming doors, calls for help, barking dogs, telephone bells. I used to sing to myself as a child, any old song, the jollier the better, to drown the others out.
    â€˜We’re off to see the wizard…’
    â€˜Muuummm!’
    â€˜Wahhhh!’
    â€˜â€¦ the wonderful wizard of Oz…’
    â€˜Brrring, brrring!’
    â€˜Woof, woof, woof!’
    â€˜â€¦ if ever a wiz of a wiz there was…’
    I was pink with indignation when it was me, tuneful, cheerful me, they told to shut up. Then along comes this quiet, gentle man with a name that sounds like pure relief; Maff-phew. So soft after the cacophony of such a childhood.
    Now try inhaling the smells. Tea-towels boiling, fish frying, nappies stinking. Bend close to the floor if you dare, get a whiff of that carpet, soaked in years of animal and human excrement. Sorry, but my brother Merry never did get the hang of toilets. Upstairs there’s a heady mixture of perfumes, teenage boys’ aftershaves, nail polish, cheap violet scent, talcum powder and that unmistakable smell you get from gerbils kept in small bedrooms. No wonder I’m thrilled by the fragrance of a manly bar of cream soap, which is all I detect about your person.
    Then there was the untidiness. My mother tried, she wasn’t slovenly, you wouldn’t have called her house-proud but she did make some effort to keep those corners clean. It was a losing battle though. The Cornflake House was an average size, not a great rambling home for a hatch of children. We fell over each other and each other’s toys constantly. Tables and chairs were hidden under books, papers, security blankets. Until I started dating and visiting, I’d never sat down without first shifting a pile of junk. To emerge from a home like that in pressed, unsoiled clothing, in shoes with matching laces, was unfeasible. We were the misfits, the new scruffs on the block. Rainbow coloured, unelasticated, tied together with bits of chewed string. We were reliably, consistently messy. You could depend on The Cornflake House kids to turn up for PE with one brown and one grey plimsoll, to appear in assembly wearing the wrong school tie. I will never be groomed, I wasn’t made that way, but I could happily bask in your spruceness, Matthew. Forgive me for getting personal, but I appreciate your form to the point where I know that you have what is, to me, a perfect body. You would be tidy even in the nude.
    At least this time I made an effort and was prepared, as best I could be. I wonder if you noticed the brushed hair and teeth, the pearls? Thank God I sat behind myself, not able to see what you saw. Imagine if we’d been designed differently, how terrible to have to watch every blush and frown, every slackening of our own jaws. Talking of blushes, do you know that your cheeks redden exquisitely under stress? A trait we have in common, at last. I’d thought we might be too precisely opposite. When you shook my hand, secreting my frog there, your jaw, which is very fine by the way, sharply outlined, twitched just a little and your complexion darkened in a way that made me long for a fan to cool you. I can’t bear it now, the distance of the law between us. Keeping my distance, trying to win you without being able to make contact, this is the second most difficult thing I have ever had to do. Perhaps life will always be this hard on me now; the second