Human Croquet Read online

  She’s very plain – white ankle socks, hair parted to one side and fastened in a hair-slide, heavy black-rimmed glasses. She’s looked exactly the same for the last five years except that she’s no longer flat-chested and has black hairs on her calves as if someone’s pulled the legs off a web of spiders and stuck them on Eunice’s legs. She’s a humourless girl who leads a very organized life – the sort who lays out all her clothes for the next day before she goes to bed and does her homework as soon as she gets in from school. My way of being organized, on the other hand, is to go to bed wearing my school uniform.

  Eunice knows about everything and never lets you forget it, so that you can’t pass a post-box or a cat on the street without Eunice expounding on the invention of the postage stamp or the evolution of the sabretoothed tiger into the cat. Click, click, click, goes Eunice’s brain. It’s formed differently – where my brain, for example, is a gallimaufry of art and poetry and over-whelming emotions and you could dip into my mental hodgepodge and come up randomly with Idylls of the King, the sinking of the Titanic or the death of Old Yeller – Eunice’s brain is modelled on a reference library – holding an unnecessary amount of facts, a clinical retrieval system and an advice desk that won’t shut up. Click, click, click.

  She’s a Guide leader, you can’t see her uniform for badges, teaches at Sunday School, sings in the school choir, plays in goal in the school hockey team, is the school chess champion and likes knitting. She intends to be a scientist and have two children, a boy and a girl (she’ll probably knit them), and a reliable husband with a well-paid job.

  Her mother, Mrs Primrose, always says, ‘Oh you’ve brought your friends home, Eunice!’ – each time surprised anew that Eunice is capable of making friends. The Primroses live in Laurel Bank, which is too close for comfort.

  ‘Primrose’ we are all agreed, is a very pretty name and it’s only a shame it’s paired with ‘Eunice’ – she could surely have been called ‘Lily or Rose or Jasmine or even … Primrose.’

  This remark is addressed to Charles over my birthday lunch of macaroni cheese in an attempt to get him interested in Eunice as a girl instead of her previous incarnation as a crashing bore, on the principle that two misfits together might make a fit. ‘Daisy,’ Mr Rice adds, uninvited, ‘Iris, Ivy, Cherry – I knew a girl called Cherry once,’ he snorts. ‘She was a bit of all right … Poppy, Marigold, Pansy … [Mr Rice is the most boring person alive] … Hyacinth, Heather—’

  ‘Gorse, wort, bladderwrack,’ Vinny interrupts him impatiently.

  ‘Violet,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that’s a pretty name.’

  Mr Primrose, Eunice’s father, is an actuary by day, an actor by night (his joke). He runs a local amateur dramatic group – ‘The Lythe Players’ – and to illustrate his artistic tendencies wears a bow-tie to work and a cravat at home. I have resisted his blandishments to join ‘The Players’ as they’re a ramshackle outfit that get laughed at even when playing tragedy. Especially when playing tragedy. Debbie has been recently persuaded to join but has so far not been allowed on stage. Even Mr Primrose, it seems, has his standards.

  Mr Primrose has, in his time, made a rather effective Lady Bracknell. ‘Oh, he’s always practising stuff like that,’ Eunice says. ‘I found him with Mummy’s négligé on the other day.’

  Is this normal, I wonder? But then, what is normal? Not Carmen’s family, surely – the McDades are liable to such casual violence that even the friendliest exchange with them is liable to result in injury – a box on the ear, a punch in the stomach. ‘Yeah,’ Carmen says, cracking gum like a whip, ‘it’s not nice, is it?’

  Carmen’s as thin as tapeworm and has waxy yellow skin that’s nearly transparent so that all her blue veins show like a human biology diagram. Her feet are the worst thing about her – skinny and flat with splayed toes and far too big for the rest of her body, the veins on them like tangled railway junctions. If this is what her feet are like at sixteen, what will they be like when she’s an old woman? But she’s an old woman now really.

  Carmen left school at the first opportunity and is already engaged to a square-set boy with the unlikely name of Bash, who could easily pass himself off as one of her brothers. She’s got her future all mapped out – the wedding, the children, the house, the long path to old age. ‘It’s not very romantic, is it?’ I venture, but she just looks at me as if I’m speaking a different language, one she doesn’t know. Carmen’s got a job on the cheese counter in British Home Stores, forcing me to spend quite a lot of time hanging around British Home Stores looking as if I need half a pound of coloured Cheddar.

  It doesn’t look such a bad job actually, I don’t think I’d mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted – which is nothing in particular, it’s true, but I like being alone in my head, I’m used to it. But, of course, the very opposite would probably turn out to be the case and far from being free to roam around in its empty spaces, my mind would most likely be full of nothing but cheese. Carmen confirms this suspicion – ‘Red Leicester’ in particular, she offers, when I ask her to be more specific.

  And poor Audrey, so quiet and self-effacing, so frightened of the blackhearted presence of Mr Baxter, that sometimes you have to look twice to make sure Audrey’s still there. Perhaps that’s how people disappear – not suddenly, as in Charles’ unexplained world where people are mysteriously plucked from their lives, but by slowly, day by day, erasing themselves.

  Elfin-bodied and angel-haired, Audrey is insubstantial, hardly part of the material world at all. ‘Eat something, Audrey, please,’ Mrs Baxter constantly urges, sometimes even following Audrey round the room with bowl and spoon as if waiting for her to inadvertently open her mouth so that she can take her unawares and pop food inside her. One day I half-expect to see Mrs Baxter regurgitating a little pellet of food and stuffing it down Audrey’s beak. Audrey hasn’t been well for weeks with some bug she can’t shake off and mooches around Sithean bundled up in big cardigans and baggy jumpers looking miserable. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Mr Baxter keeps snapping as if she’s making herself ill just to annoy him.

  We are all mis-shapen in some way, inside or out. Carmen’s aunt, Wanda, works in a chocolate factory and supplies the McDades with endless bags of misshapes, rejected by quality control. After-dinner mints that have got their geometry all wrong – rhomboid instead of square; chocolate wafer biscuits that have been born as triplets instead of twins and mints that have lost their holes. Whenever I think of us – Carmen, Audrey, Eunice or myself – I think of Wanda’s misshapes, girls’ bodies that have been rejected by quality control.

  Why don’t I have friends of Nordic beauty – tall and golden and normal? Friends like Hilary Walsh. Hilary is the head girl at Glebelands Grammar, as was her sister, Dorothy, before her. Dorothy is now at Glebelands University (founded by Edward VI, one of the oldest in the country). Hilary and Dorothy are both big clever blondes who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a Swiss milking-parlour. No chance of them disappearing. The Walshes live in a vast Georgian house in town. Mr Walsh owns some kind of business and Mrs Walsh is a JP.

  Hilary and Dorothy have an older brother, Graham, also a student at Glebelands University. Graham doesn’t share his sisters’ Aryan qualities – smaller, thinner, darker than his sisters, as if Mr and Mrs Walsh were just practising when they had him.

  Good-looking boys, who are studying dentistry and law and look as if they’re members of the Hitler Youth, hover around Hilary and Dorothy like wasps round a jam-jar, keen to study their biological perfection. My chances of ever being like them are zero. Next to them, I’m a chimney-sweep, a walnut-skinned beggar girl.

  ‘What very black hair you have, don’t you, Isobel?’ Hilary remarks one day (it’s unusual for Hilary to even talk to me), stroking a finger over her porcelain (‘English Rose’) cheek. ‘And such dark eyes! Were your parents foreign?’

  Hilary stables her white pony at the farm beyond Hawthorn Cl
ose and sometimes I see her riding round the Lady Oak field. In the early morning mist she could easily be mistaken for a centaur, half-horse, half-girl.

  I can see her now riding in slow dressage circles around the Lady Oak. The branches of the tree are covered in tightly budded leaves, like little green jewels. To the Druids the tree was the link between heaven and earth. What would happen if I climbed the Lady Oak, would I reach heaven, or just some everyday giant shouting Fee-fi-fo-fum as he chased me down again?

  ‘April Fool,’ Debbie says (quite inappropriately) as she hands me a gift-wrapped parcel over the lunch table, and before I can have the surprise of opening it, says, ‘A nice cardi from Marks and Sparks.’ If I am the April Fool, then Charles, born the first of March, must be the mad March hare.

  ‘Thank you,’ I mutter rather ungraciously. I’d asked for a dog. ‘But we’ve already got a dog,’ Debbie bleats, indicating her own ‘Gigi’ – an apricot toy poodle that looks as if it’s been lightly grilled around the edges and an animal that no wolf would own up to having helped evolve. Mr Rice has, helpful for once, tried to assassinate Gigi on several occasions, smothering, strangling, stretching, alas nothing has worked. (What does Mr Rice travel in? Shoes. Charles used to think this a great joke.)

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Vinny says, as Debbie clears away the remains of the watery macaroni cheese from under her nose. Vinny snatches her plate back again. ‘You’re not even eating that,’ Debbie protests.

  ‘So?’ Vinny sneers. (Vinny would make a good adolescent.) ‘Even the dog wouldn’t eat this stuff.’ Debbie is a dreadful cook, it’s hard to believe that she completed a year training to be a domestic science teacher in New Zealand. What would make a good birthday repast? Roasted swan and breast of lapwing, bud of asparagus, leaf of artichoke. And desserts, desserts moulded like castles and decorated like courtesans – studded with maraschino nipples and draped in piped swags of whipped cream. Not that I would ever eat a lapwing. Nor a swan, come to that.

  Against all the odds, Debbie clings to the strict blueprint for family life that she came to us with four years ago, one which she herself received carved on tablets of stone from people called ‘Mum and Dad’. ‘Dad’ was a school janitor and ‘Mum’ was a housewife and the whole family emigrated when Debbie was ten. This blueprint dictates that she must impose order on a disordered world, which she does by means of feverish housework. ‘Someone take the key out of her back,’ Vinny sighs wearily. Soon I expect we’ll find Debbie in the hearth separating lentils from the ashes.

  Arden has her in its thrall. ‘This house’, she complains to Gordon, ‘has a life of its own.’ ‘Possibly,’ Gordon sighs. The house does seem to conspire against her – if she buys new curtains then a plague of moths will follow, if she puts down lino, the washing-machine will flood. Her kitchen tiles crack and fall off, the new central-heating pipes rattle and moan and bang in the night like banshees. If she polishes everything in a room then the minute she leaves, the particles of dust will come out of their hiding-places and regroup on every surface, sniggering behind their little hands. (We must imagine those things we cannot see.) The dust in Arden isn’t really dust, of course, but the talcum of the dead, a frail composite waiting to be reconstituted.

  She tries to grow vegetables in the garden and produces instead mandrake-rooted carrots and green potatoes. Greenfly and blackfly crowd the air like locusts, her runner beans are stunted, her cabbages are yellow, her pea-pods empty, her lawn as blighted as a blasted heath. Over the hedge, next door, Mrs Baxter’s garden buzzes with honey-bees and is smothered in flowers – beanstalks that touch the clouds and each white curd on her cauliflowers as big as a tree.

  Poor Debbie, lingering under the Fairfax curse that dictates nothing will ever go right or – to be more specific – everything will always go wrong just when it looks as if it might go right.

  ‘Well, someone has to do it,’ Debbie snaps at Vinny as Vinny queries the need to get up from the dining-room table to enable Debbie to polish it, ‘and it’s obviously not going to be you.’

  ‘Certainly bloody isn’t,’ Vinny says, refusing to move so that Debbie has to polish around her while she chews on a cigarette, revealing her crocus-coloured teeth. Always an heroic fumeuse (Vinny’s been kippered by nicotine), she’s recently taken to smoking roll-ups, leaving shreds of Golden Virginia in her wake wherever she goes. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims every time she comes across one of Vinny’s dog-ends with the life sucked out of it. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims as Vinny showers the macaroni cheese remains with a garnish of tobacco. ‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny murmurs enigmatically.

  ‘Now, now,’ Gordon says, for ever trying to keep the peace. And failing. Poor Gordon. He has taken the loss of the family fortunes in his stride. ‘I never wanted to be a grocer anyway,’ he says, but did he want to be a lowly pen-pusher in Glebelands Corporation town-planning department? ‘You can’t go wrong in local government jobs,’ Debbie encouraged approvingly, ‘pension schemes and regular holidays and a chance of promotion. Like Dad.’ (‘What do janitors get promoted to?’ Charles puzzled.) What did Gordon do when he was in New Zealand? He looks wistful and smiles sadly, ‘Sheep farm.’

  The only thing in the whole world that Debbie wants is the thing she cannot have. A baby. It appears that she is infertile (‘Barren!’ Vinny crows). ‘Something wrong with my tubes,’ Debbie explains (in less biblical terms) to all and sundry, ‘women’s trouble.’ Tubes! I think of Debbie as a great Underground map – instead of nerves and veins and arteries perhaps she has the Metropolitan and the District and Circle.

  ‘It’s the curse of the Fairfaxes,’ Charles tells her cheerfully.

  To compensate for not being pregnant, Debbie seems to be growing fatter and fatter. She’s like a big plumped-up cushion on legs. Her wedding ring is cutting into her finger and she’s developed a cascade of little chins. Her inability to spawn is in stark contrast to the empire of cats in Arden (Vinny is their queen) which is expanding exponentially.

  Elemanzer, one of Vinny’s feline cohorts, entwines itself with playful malevolence around Mr Rice’s ankles under the table. He gives her a swift kick and leers at me, ‘Sweet sixteen, eh?’, wiping macaroni cheese off his greasy lips. Mr Rice, the lodger who will not leave, has lately grown almost intimate with Vinny – sharing a glass of Madeira and a game of bezique every Friday evening. ‘You don’t think they have a physical relationship, do you?’ Debbie whispers in horror to Gordon and Gordon snorts with laughter, ‘When time goes backward.’

  Mr Rice gives a little scream as the cat claws his leg in retaliation but must stifle it with his napkin or there will be trouble from Vinny.

  ‘I’m making you a birthday cake,’ Debbie says and from the oven comes the sound of something bubbling monstrously, beyond control. The kitchen is the most malign place in the house for Debbie, here is the cradle of chaos theory – a dropped teaspoon at one end of the kitchen can cause the oven to catch fire and everything to fall off the pantry shelves at the other end.

  ‘Lovely,’ I say and flee round to Sithean, the scent of sadness at my back. I pass Gordon in the back garden contemplating the big overgrown elder tree that is growing too close to the house. When you look out of the dining-room window nowadays all you can see is the tree and it taps and shakes its leaves against the window as if it would dearly like you to let it in. Gordon is leaning on a huge old axe like some philosopher-woodcutter. ‘It’s going to have to go,’ he says sadly. He should be careful, witches have been known to disguise themselves as elders.

  A more comforting smell than birthday cake greets me in Sithean. ‘Marmalade,’ Mrs Baxter says, scumming honey-coloured froth off the sugary mess bubbling in her big copper pan. The marmalade’s the colour of tawny amber and melted lions. ‘The very last of the Sevilles,’ she says sadly as if the Sevilles were some great aristocratic family whose fortunes had failed. ‘Have a wee stir of the jeely-pan,’ Mrs Baxter urges, handing me a long-
handled wooden spoon, ‘and make a wish. Go on wish, wish,’ she says like a demented fairy godmother.

  ‘For whatever I want?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ (I wish, naturally, for sex with Malcolm Lovat.)

  ‘You could be having a party,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘or playing a game.’ Mrs Baxter would have us playing games all the time if she could. She has a book – The Home Entertainer (of which she’s very fond) – a relic of the happy childhood she once had and a book that can provide a game for every occasion. ‘Indoor pastimes,’ she says, nodding happily as she stirs the marmalade, an ‘April the First Party’ maybe? ‘An April the First Party,’ she reads from the book, ‘is often highly amusing, for all the world loves a fool. You must be careful, however, that the guests are congenial and chosen carefully.’ This seems like sound advice to me.

  Audrey is sitting hunched up at the kitchen table writing labels methodically in her neat handwriting – ‘Marmalade – April ‘60’ – her golden-red hair escaping in a fine halo around her hairline. She looks up and gives me her lovely melon slice of a smile, always a surprise, like sunshine coming out from behind a sombre cloud.

  Mrs Baxter pours the hot marmalade in one long shower of gold into gleaming glass jars. Mrs Baxter is a hedgecomber, her pantry’s crammed full with jams and jellies and cheeses of every different kind – crabapple jelly and damson cheese, strawberry conserve and elderberry, rosehip syrup and sloe gin.