And so we ate, and did not speak. Our speechlessness amplified all the small noises of a meal: the squeaks of silver on china, the setting down of a wineglass on a coaster, the muted chewing of soft fish-flesh. I became aware of a rhythm to Larry’s mastication and started to keep count. He chewed twenty times per mouthful, rarely more or less, although sometimes he paused to purse his lips and extrude a small white fishbone and place it, at a regular interval from the last, on the scalloped rim of his china plate. Soon all that remained of his meal was the frame of the fish and this tidy parade of curving bones. As his knife and fork clattered together on the plate, I breathed out in relief, certain that now conversation would begin in earnest.
‘What’s for dessert?’ he asked.
‘I hadn’t planned —’ Judy began.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your cholesterol? Remember, Dr Maxwell said …and we talked about your cutting back?’
‘Plums and ice-cream, please.’
‘I’m sorry, love, but we haven’t any plums.’
‘No plums?’
‘No, no plums.’
He sat for a moment, thinking, and pursing his lips in the same way as he had done to eject his fish bones.
‘Why, Judith, have we no plums?’
‘We finished all the ones I preserved.’
‘You didn’t think, perhaps, to get some more?’
‘The last time I was at Tescos they hadn’t any plums either.’
‘I am given to understand that you went to a major supermarket and were unable to obtain plums?’
‘I’m very sorry, love, but if they don’t have plums, well, they don’t have plums. There’s not much I can do about it.’
‘Then I suppose I shall have to have prunes.’
‘Rosie?’
I could already imagine the prune stones nestling in the scalloped edging of the dessert bowl.
‘Nothing for me. Thanks.’
Breakfast, I thought, would be the ideal opportunity for a second attempt at becoming warmly reacquainted with my godfather. Perhaps, on the previous evening, he’d been tired after a long day at work. Perhaps his meeting had gone very badly. Perhaps certain stone fruits were his only hope for expelling the substantial carrot that appeared to have been shoved up his arse.
‘Good morning, Larry,’ I said brightly when he arrived at the table and selected a piece of toast from the rack placed there only seconds earlier by Judy.
‘Rosemary.’
‘What excitement does your day hold?’
‘Ex
cite
ment? I'm going to work.’
‘Well, if not exciting, will it be a productive day, perhaps?’
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a section of the newspaper Judy had set down beside his breakfast plate. ‘This should be to your taste.’
He had folded it open to the comics. I pointedly turned over to the opinion page and, for quite some time, tried to engage with the various debates that were being furthered in the paper’s small dense type.
‘What does supercilious mean?’ I asked absent-mindedly, my mouth full of toast and jam.
‘Why?’ he asked, through the grey tissue of the financial pages. ‘Who called you that?’
True, it was not quite the reception I’d expected. But I didn’t let it get me down; Judy was friendly enough, and I was sure Larry would come around eventually. In the meantime, London was just a short, speeding train ride away.
In the Underground I was Alice, tumbling through the blackened rabbit-holes of the city. I was a child in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, hurtling along bright-coloured tubes as they bent and weaved through space at map-neat angles. Wherever in the city I was, I was never far from a magic portal that could take me somewhere else. In Covent Garden, I watched a man dislocate both shoulders in order to pass his body through a stringless tennis racket. In Oxford Street, I bought a brand new pair of sixteen-hole, cherry-red Doc Martens and a hot chocolate. I leafed through, but could not afford, the wares of the antiquarian bookshops of Charing Cross Road. In Trafalgar Square I got pigeon shit in my hair.
But if, in the Mother Country, I had found myself in a kind of Wonderland, then chief among the strange creatures whose unpredictable manners I did not understand was my godfather himself.
‘Where are you going today?’ Larry asked me one morning, as I stood in his hallway putting on my coat.
‘I thought I might go and look at the house where Gran grew up. It’s not too far from here, apparently,’ I said.
‘Is it necessary, do you think,’ he began, leaning in so close behind me that I could smell his breath, ‘for the purpose of visiting your grandmother’s childhood home, to dress like a kindergarten whore?’
‘Sorry?’
My outfit, comprised of findings from a week’s worth of rabbit-hole journeys through London, involved the cherry-red Doc Martens, a pair of torn denim hotpants from the Camden Markets, some Union Jack tights from Soho and a frothy shirt with lace ruffles at the sleeves that I had unearthed at Portobello Road. Only my red duffle coat had come from home. Now I buttoned it up, right to the neck, blushing brightly enough to match it.
‘Don’t be any later than five o’clock,’ Larry said, tweaking a hank of my hair before he walked out the door.
Of course my mother had told me — as all mothers tell their girls at some stage — that the only reason boys pull girls’ hair is because they like them but don’t know how to say so. But I needed clarification. Was this, I wondered as I walked to the train station, a truism that applied equally well to middle-aged men as to schoolboys?
By this stage in my travels, I had learned a little about British public transport etiquette. I was getting pretty good at avoiding eye contact, ignoring beggars and sidestepping spruikers. But on the day I set off for my grandmother’s house, there was sitting opposite me an old woman who did not seem to know that it was rude, on trains, to look people right in the face.
She was a very small person and she wore a dress that was black with white polka-dots, but which had at the throat a large, floppy bow that was white with black dots. She sat not in the way that most of the other travellers did — right back in their comfortless seats, slouched and with their heads in their books/earphones/personal reveries — but on the very edge of her seat, her buckled hands resting together on the handle of an umbrella. Its canopy was also black with white polka-dots, although these dots, I noticed, were of a marginally greater circumference than those on her dress. Her hair was bright white and her shoes were tiny black lace-ups with a not-inconsiderable heel. She was so marvellous that I wanted to stare at her, but I couldn’t, since she was already staring at me. So I took in her image in flickers, my eyes gathering just a little more information each time my gaze moved from the port to the starboard windows and back again. I loved how her saggy cheeks were punctuated with glaring circles of reddish rouge, and how badly painted were her lips. I tried to read her life story from her wrinkles, but could not decide whether her face was set in an expression of concern, or amusement, or an equal mixture of the two.
A Word from Rosie Little on:
Facial Lines
N
o doubt your mother, or some other responsible adult in your life, warned you about pulling faces when a change in wind direction was on the cards. Of course, the idea that you could end up with the tip of your tongue lodged permanently in a nostril just because the breeze swung to the east sounds as ridiculous as green vegetables putting hairs on your chest, or the marrow in your bones melting because you sat with your back too close to the fire. But on reflection (my own reflection, as it happens, in my very own bathroom mirror), I’ve decided that the saying about pulling faces is not an
entirely
silly one after all.
Get on a bus full of old people and you’ll understand what I mean. It’s easy to pick the woman who’s spent her life indulging herself in moral indignation, tightening her lips against mothers who are too young, mothers who are too old, young men with dangerous-looking haircuts, and Winifred Martin going off with May Charleston’s husband, and at their age, honestly. Yes, you’ll be able to pick her in a trice, since she’ll be the one with the cat's arse where her mouth ought to be.
I once met a monk called Father Basil and I can attest to the fact that a life of contemplation does magnificent things for your skin in old age. Sit around all day with a beatific smile on your face, pondering the beauty of nature and the essential goodness of humanity, and you really will end up with your face permanently set in an expression of deep serenity. It’s too late for me, of course, to achieve such a thing. At just past thirty, I’ve already laid the groundwork for my old woman’s face, and what with all the bemused and quizzical faces I’ve affected in my time, I’m bound to be a very puzzled-looking octogenarian. Oh, that wind is out there all right. It just takes a few years for it to change you.
‘Enjoying your travels?’ the polka-dot woman asked directly.
‘Who me?’ I feigned, but the glitter in her eye told me that she was not taken in. ‘Am I really that obviously a tourist?’
‘Do you see anyone else looking out the windows?’
‘Oh.’
‘But you appear to be having a good adventure. And adventure is good for the soul, don’t you find?’
‘Absolutely!’ I said, coming swiftly to the opinion that this woman was every bit as wonderful as her eccentric outfit. I was willing to bet she would know the answer to the hair-tweaking question.
‘This next town is very picturesque. I’m sure you’d love it.’
‘I'm sure I would too, but my stop is four on from here.’
‘I like your boots,’ she said, her smile a dare.
‘I like your whole ensemble,’ I rejoined, and she closed her eyes as she effected a slow curtsey with her head.
As the train slowed into the next station, I caught sight of the latticed windows of its village shops and a man with a pipe walking a cobbled street with a sheepish border collie at his side. Enchanted, I jumped up from my seat just in time to clip the train’s exit button and have the sliding doors open out onto a scene straight off an English biscuit tin. And as I stepped off the train, the polka-dot woman caught my eye, and winked.
In the village, I took tea and sent postcards and bought the kinds of sweets desired by girls on their way to a new term at boarding school. I wandered across an ancient bridge and down a grassy way to a riverbank, resting upon which was a very large white swan. There had been a swan in the slender illustrated storybook Gran had given to me one Christmas of my childhood: the story of a girl whose father went to sea and left her in the care of a terrible old woman who didn’t feed her enough, and who allowed her clothes to turn into rags that the girl herself was forced to mend, at night, by candlelight.
The swan came to the girl’s rescue, however, bringing her bread scraps in the basket he carried in his beak and, finally, allowing her to ride on his broad feathered back as he flew out over the sea to greet her father’s returning ship. I approached the living replica of my fictional swan, already imagining how soft its feathers would feel as I stroked the noble curve of its head. But when the swan saw me coming, it reared up to form a cave of white feathers that seemed higher than I was tall. I had never thought of a swan as behaving otherwise than tranquilly, but here was one flapping wildly and almost growling, whipping an angry beak about on the end of a long mobile neck. I turned and ran, but the swan chased me and lashed out to strike me on the bum.
‘Gosh, I saw that. Are you all right?’ called a tallish boy coming down the bank towards me from the place where a book was splayed out, face down on a park bench.
‘That must have looked quite funny,’ I said, embarrassed that my stupidity had had an audience.
‘Funny? No, swans can be vicious. Snap a kiddie’s arm with that beak.’
‘It’s going to be a good bruise,’ I said, rubbing the buttock that would indeed, over the next few days, bloom impressively in shades of purple and green.
‘You’re not from here,’ the boy said, looking quite pleased.
‘Clearly not.’
‘What are you, Aussie or Kiwi?’ he asked, beginning a conversation that swiftly lapped the globe, took in the title of the book he’d been reading, traversed the oeuvres of our favourite writers and circled back to land on the subject of our names.
‘Julian,’ he said, and the hand he offered felt warm and clean.
My nose was level with his sternum and, since his ribbed jumper smelled of the kind of washing powder only a mother would use, I felt quite safe.
‘Rosie,’ I said.
On the riverbank, we continued to talk. And then we adjourned to the darkened interior of a small pub that I did not confess to being eleven and a half months too young to enter. Nothing on tap behind the sturdy oaken bar was familiar, and none of the names on the cans in the fridge meant anything to me either (except XXXX, which I knew that no real Australians drank anyway).
‘I’ve got no idea,’ I said. ‘What would you be having if you weren’t driving?’
‘Snakebite and black,’ he said.
‘Which is?’
‘Cider, lager and blackcurrant juice.’
Remembering Rene Pogel, I did a quick cocktail-safety check, but could discern no particular threat in Kcalb dna Etibekans.
‘One of those then,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I sipped so slowly that my pint of snakebite and black lasted for all the time that it took for us to tell each other our whole lives. And just before I was going to be late getting back, Julian drove me home in his tinny little car. Outside Larry and Judy’s house, he settled a hand protectively on top of mine.
‘I have two little sisters, you know, and I would hate to think that either of them would ever get into a car with a strange man like you’ve just done. I want you to promise me that you won’t ever do it again.’
It was funny to hear this sweet boy refer to himself as a strange man, but his face was so serious that I resisted the temptation to giggle. Instead, I risked a quick kiss on his cheek, and dashed up the path to the front door, wondering how, exactly, I was going to describe to Larry and Judy my gran’s childhood home.
Over the next few weeks, I determined that my mother’s hair-pulling advice did not apply in this case. Larry most definitely did not like me. On some days he treated me in the same indifferent manner he treated Judy, and on other days he flustered himself up into a performance of patriarchal zeal, all curfews and rules and telling me to tidy my room. I did feel sorry for him that he had no children of his own to discipline (well, okay, not
that
sorry), but at seventeen I felt too old to be told which train to catch and what time to be home. And was it my imagination, or was his behaviour becoming increasingly erratic at roughly the same rate that I was getting to know Julian?