The Private Parts of Women (7 page)

I filled the baths with stop and fix, rolled on my rubber-gloves and watched my family bloom up through the wet like Chinese water-flowers.

Christmas day:

A bulging stocking hanging at the bed-head of a sleeping boy.

A tousled man sitting up in bed eating a chocolate snowman.

A boy in a bear mask, his pyjama-trousers falling down.

A baby half-buried in crumpled wrapping-paper.

A boy building with new bricks. Expression of fierce concentration.

A baby girl regarding a Christmas cracker with wonder.

A man holding up a glass of wine, eyes shining love at the photographer.

And more and more and more. I hardly even cried. I pegged the prints up to dry, like so much washing, and went to bed.

I woke thinking I
will not
get involved, feeling cross with the little man who had presumed so much. Just because I live next door to Trixie doesn't make her my responsibility. I don't want responsibility, that is the point, that is why I am here. Just because I'm a woman he thinks I must care. How wrong about someone can you be?

And then this morning I saw Trixie in her garden. I was about to go out to hang some knickers and T-shirts on the line, but when I saw she was out there, I waited. I didn't want to talk to her or anyone. I wanted only to work, though I was losing heart with all the wandering and searching. I needed a subject.

Trixie was wearing a pale green raincoat. As I watched from the back window, she knelt slowly and stiffly down on a cushion and began to weed her garden. There's not a weed to be seen but she was pulling something like invisible hairs from the soil. And then she leant forward and stooped right down low with her face only inches from a clump of golden crocuses, glowing as if they had electric light-bulbs inside, grown so quickly from the little green spears she'd pointed out. She was quite still. I couldn't see whether her eyes were shut or not but she looked as if she was engaged in an act of worship or devotion. Embarrassed to be spying on her in this attitude, I turned away from the window, wishing I could capture her like that, on film.

Next thing, I heard a cry. I looked out again and saw that Trixie had fallen forward, her face in the flowers, her legs unfolding awkwardly behind her. I went out, through the gate. Her face had broken the crocuses.

‘Trixie …' I was thinking about strokes, heart attacks, all the things that lie in wait for old people, the things that have punctuated so many of Richard's (and my own) nights. ‘Are you all right?'

She turned her head to the side. There was yellow pollen on her cheek and soil between her lips. ‘Perfectly, thank you,' she said with such aplomb I almost laughed.

‘I heard you shout. Did you fall?'

‘Just trying to get up, dear. Always clumsy, always was.'

I struggled to help her to her feet. I hadn't realised how big she was, not tall, but solid and sturdy under her layers of clothes. When she was up I helped her inside, she was limping badly, when she was sitting down on a kitchen chair, I saw that she had scraped her shin and knee.

‘I'll make some tea, shall I?' I said. ‘But we'd better wash that.' Her stocking was ruined and dark gritty blood was slowly oozing. I could feel my morning oozing away too and felt guilty for minding. She wouldn't let me lift her skirt to unfasten her stocking so I cut it open with scissors. A child's graze is different; tight, healthy skin skimmed off and bright healthy blood speckling underneath. Robin used to wriggle and scream while I bathed his grazed knees in warm water with TCP but as soon as he had a plaster on he'd be proud and happy.

‘Look,' he'd say to anyone at all, ‘I've graved myself.'

But old skin is loose. It tears and hangs in flimsy rags. The blood is thick and dark, it wells up sluggish and stubborn.

‘Perhaps you should go to A and E,' I suggested.

‘What's that when it's at home?'

‘Accident and Emergency. You know, Casualty. I'll go out and phone for a taxi…'

‘No, no.'

I started dabbing at her knee with Dettol, since that's all she had, and tissues. She made a strange quiet groan and I looked up to see that her face had turned the colour of putty and her eyelids were fluttering. I stuck a couple of pieces of lint over the grazes with some scraps of plaster. ‘I'd better make your tea,' I said, frightened she was going to collapse on the floor, finding myself wishing that Richard was here, capable and confident, so I could slope off.

‘Want to lie down,' she mumbled. There was no way I was going to get her up the steep stairs, heavy and faint as she was, so we went into the cold front room and she lay down on a sofa that was covered in crackly plastic. I tried to take it off before she lay down but she resisted. The curtains were drawn. ‘Shall I let a bit of light in?' I suggested, but she shook her head and closed her eyes. I switched on the electric-fire that stood on the hearth and the dust on it fizzed.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, I found myself blaming Mr Blowski for this; as if him asking me to keep an eye on her had caused it. I wandered round, looking at this and that, all the old-ladyish things. One of the photographs on the piano showed a little girl in a floppy white dress, a look almost of terror on her face. Another one was of a plump woman with unsuitably shingled hair with some older children and the same little girl. Trixie presumably, though not recognisably. Stuck into the edge of the frame was a photo-booth shot of Mr Blowski, baring his NHS teeth in a fierce smile.

The kettle boiled and I made leaf tea in a pot, something I never bother with any more myself, a tea-bag in a cup does me, besides it's hotter. I couldn't find the china cups but there was a Bovril mug hanging on a hook so I poured it out in that with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar for shock. Trixie struggled to a sitting position when I went in, she looked much better.

‘I'm quite recovered now, thank you dear. Oh that's Blowski's mug – never mind. You get back to your …'

‘I
have
got some work on the go,' I said. ‘I'm a photographer.'

‘Is that a job?'

‘Of course.'

‘For the newspapers?'

‘Not generally no … I do portraits commercially and …' I don't know what got into me then, I hadn't meant to talk about it, but I found myself rambling on about portraits of children and old people, making a kaleidoscope of images to make some sort of sense of life and death, oh I don't know, talking rubbish.

‘Well I'm here, you could do me,' she said, ‘that is if I'm the type …'

‘Yes,' I said, surprised and almost touched. I thought that it was all right, this morning, this involvement, if it led me to a subject. ‘I might take you up on that.'

‘You get off then,' Trixie said.

‘Sure you don't want anything – maybe something from the shop?'

‘Oh yes,' she said, ‘save me going out in this state.'

‘Put a list through my door,' I said, ‘I'll do it later. I'll get some stuff for your leg.'

When I got into my own house again my enthusiasm had diminished. I went and hung my washing on the line, though the sun has gone in. Trixie's crocuses are smashed like a yellow sunburst on the soil. I feel cross that I've got myself involved. I feel the clinging tendrils of her need. Like bindweed, yes. Or babies' fingers.

SALVATION

Trixie sits on the crackling plastic watching the dark blood soak through the lint on her leg. She almost never sits in this room. Television reception is best at the back and, anyway, people gawp right in here if the curtains are open, straight through the nets. That's the worst of this house, that it has no front garden, so people pass within inches of the window and if they're talking their voices even vibrate the glass. Sometimes things are left on the outside window-sill – a sill just begging for a window-box of trailing geraniums in another setting – fizzy-drinks cans, or curry-sauce-stained polystyrene dishes, or nuggets of spat-out chewing-gum. There's no sense of privacy so she keeps this door shut and the best sofa that Blowski got her to buy how many years ago, twenty? is still pristine under its plastic cover.

‘So much money!' he'd exclaimed when he'd seen her bank books. ‘My God, Trixie Bell you are a woman of fortune. Why you not spend?' She'd bought the sofa to humour him but there was nothing she really wanted, not that money could buy. She sends money to charity. She likes appeals on television, for the blind and lifeboats and children struggling about with plastic limbs, she sits with her pen and pad ready, her cheque-book by her side. If she's not sure about a particular cause, God helps her, via the Bible. She opens at random, circles her finger in the air and wherever it rests she takes advice. For instance she was doubtful about the worth of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds until her fingertip, guided by God's own, picked out:
I am become like a pelican in the wilderness and like an owl that is in the desert
, and then she wrote a most generous cheque, for what could be clearer than that? But an appeal for Relate turned up
Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel
, and caused her to shut her cheque-book very firmly.

She heaves herself up, her knee stinging badly, and takes Blowski's mug into the kitchen to rinse. Fancy asking Inis to get her shopping! She feels cross, tetchy, having someone else knowing her business, knowing even what she eats, doing things in her own kitchen as if she's quite at home. The cheek of the young. Although she can't go out, not feeling so shaky, all at sixes and sevens. She will have to allow herself to be helped. Not that it won't be a relief to stay put, away from strangers' eyes. As long as she doesn't let Inis any further in. Something niggles her, something else, oh the photographs, yes, whatever possessed her to offer herself up like that! Must have fallen more heavily than she thought, got a knock on the head.

She tips the tea-leaves into her kitchen compost tidy and goes upstairs, feeling restless, the stairs need a brush, there are dust balls at the corners, a brush and a wipe, only a five-minute job, but not now. From her back-bedroom window she looks down at her garden. Her kneeling cushion is still where she left it on the concrete – lucky she didn't crack her head on that edge. Inis's smalls are dripping on the line – though it looks like rain. From above you can properly appreciate how organised Trixie's garden is but not how rich. It is like a mouth pursed on secrets at this time of year, all the buds and bulbs are invisible shoots of promise.

The room is small and square. Her bed is single, there is a chest of drawers, a ladderback chair and a clothes rail swathed in plastic. There is no mirror, but one painting, which she'd kept near her since childhood, of girls gathering wild flowers. Trixie pulls the plastic off the rail. She unbuttons her cardigan and unzips the front of her dress. She stands in her slip and ruined stockings for a moment, then takes some different things from the rail: a navy-blue serge skirt which will nowhere near do up and has a long mend all down the side; a crimson blouse, a navy jacket, also several sizes too small, and last of all, and almost reverently, a black bonnet with a fraying red band. Despite her grazed knee, Trixie kneels on the floor to pray, the pain of the rough carpet pressed by her weight against the sore place brings tears to her eyes but almost pleasurable tears. It is a pleasure to suffer pain in prayer. When she wears these clothes now, now that she is whole and normal she feels that any evil use they have been put to is, if not forgotten, forgiven. She nearly burnt them once, thought it best to rid the world of a Salvation Army uniform defiled, but now she is grateful that she didn't. She sends her mind back to before and, hauling herself up, picks up her tambourine and begins to sing. When her voice comes out strong and clear she knows she is forgiven, that she is healed and whole, that God is hearing her, she sings:

Jesus, save me through and through
,

Save me from self-mending:

Self-salvation will not do
,

Pass me through the cleansing
,

which makes her think of washing-machines, and a soul as pure and blameless as a Persil-white tea-towel pegged out in the sun.

She sings for an hour until her strength gives out and when she finishes, the silence is dreadful. She strains her ears for the sound of Inis next door but she is so quiet, ideal of course to have a quiet neighbour but there seems something almost sneaky about such complete silence all the same. What sort of person goes without a television in this day and age? Just for a moment she catches herself missing the sound of the butcher shouting at his wife or the dreadful so-called music of their children.

But, as she divests herself of her Salvation Army uniform and struggles back into her crimplene dress and buttons her cardigan she banishes the ungrateful thought. Inis is good, kind and helpful. Beggars can't be choosers when all's said and done. Blowski's forever blethering on about the Social Services, home-helps, guardian angels (ha), but Trixie is not having that sort of carry on, not in her house, not nosing strangers. She could afford the most luxurious nursing-home there is, satin sheets no doubt and whirlpools and black-pudding and champagne for breakfast every day (that is, if she drank) but no. None of that razzmatazz is for her. Here she'll stay until she goes out feet first, her money secure in the bank and in stocks and bonds and goodness knows what else, all safely bequeathed to the Salvation Army, because there was nothing in her father's will to stipulate the recipient of the money
after
her death. He never thought of that.

ROOKS

I fetched Trixie's shopping – eggs, yoghurt, plasters, Germolene – but I did not stay and talk. She was all right, recovered, she'd been singing, I'd heard her. I'd worked in the darkroom most of the rest of that day, exposing trees and holes in the road. When I'd finished I was dazzled and despondent. They didn't add up to anything. Every print shouted,
so what?