Under My Skin (3 page)

In the sitting room we watch the TV with the volume turned down. She is eating a bag of white bonbons and I am eating a chocolate frog. The front door bangs shut and then Larry puts his head around the door. He kisses the top of my head and slides down into my armchair.

‘Anything happen today?’ he asks. Doreen points the remote control at the TV but the channel does not change.

‘Not much,’ I tell him. He puts his arm around me and kisses my hair. ‘Made Pasta Putana. Watched some TV.’

On Wednesday I take my grandmother to the swimming pool. Her name is Djuna Ethel Hendleberg Swann. She is eighty-three years old and usually we spell her first name with a simple ‘J’. In 1935, Juna swam the English Channel. She wanted to beat the record set by Gertrude Ederle, the first woman ever. But it took Juna sixteen hours and forty-nine minutes. Now she says it takes her that long just to get up the stairs. She wears a purple hat that is shaped like a mushroom and when we walk in the park, she runs her stick along the rails. Once when we were in a hotel she got stuck, with a large crate of broccoli, in the service lift. I have to watch her all the time but it’s not any trouble. She is happiest when I put her make-up on and she loves blue eyeshadow and fire-engine-red nails.

At the swimming pool she undresses very slowly. She has a black and white striped bathing costume and she looks a bit like a zebra stepping across the room. She wears earplugs and goggles and a tightly fitted blue Speedo cap. Her glasses have to be inside her handbag before she puts her goggles on. Her clothes have to be folded really neatly before her earplugs go in. Her teeth have to be wrapped in a tissue before her swimming cap goes on – and all these things are like a road map or a trail of breadcrumbs to take her back home. Then she begins to move carefully from the locker room to the pool. Sometimes she gets confused when there are too many doors and she always wants to go back out the same door she came in. So I steer her the other way and when she smiles suddenly, she puts one hand shyly up to her face. She looks different without her glasses and teeth, a bit like another person underneath herself. Her white hair is gone under the swimming cap and it turns her into a mad pixie thing. ‘This is one way to clear the kids out of the pool,’ I tell her and that
never fails to make her laugh. I warn her about the steps and stay really close to her and then she stands very still for a moment and with one slow, steady glide, she launches herself in. She can still pound out a few good strokes. ‘The American Crawl’, she calls it. The same one she used in 1935.

She turns over then and tries the back crawl.

‘Now you’re just showing off,’ I tell her.

‘I never lost it,’ she says.

Outside the spray flies into the air as the breakers crash up and down and then into one another again. Every week she points out the pink church where her best friend got married and then we take the slope down on to the sand and begin to walk slowly, her arm linked through mine. There is a black cannon on the promenade. A surfer’s shop. A hut that sells fishing tackle. A giant plastic ice cream cone. Vertigo is on the first corner into the main street and opposite is my place of work – the vintage record shop.

‘Which would you like?’ I ask her. ‘A cone or some tea?’

‘Neither,’ she says flatly and then, ‘We stayed in the Atlantic Hotel once.’ Her eyes rest on a row of new shops. ‘Somewhere over there.’

We walk to the first pub and ask for tea. Inside there are men and women sitting on bar stools and children running around the room. We find a quiet corner where there are old-fashioned road signs and a white chamber pot hangs over our heads. We sit away from everyone, where it is peaceful and we are up on a high cushioned form. We sit side by side and we are quiet, our cheeks still fresh with the sea wind. The tea arrives. A giant silver pot. Two big mugs. Pink and blue.

‘It is the best tea I have ever had.’

Every Wednesday I say this and every Wednesday she smiles at the size of the mugs.

‘People are very generous here,’ she says. The rain begins to spatter on the windows beside us.

‘Let’s stay here for ever, Juna,’ I want to say, but she is looking at the pictures on the walls and reading the names of the old street signs. I want to tell her that I will look after her. That I will take good care of her – no matter what. But how can anyone suddenly say this? She would say she does not need me to care for her. That she likes her life the way it is. Living on the farm with a big cat jumping out of every chair. And how will she go in the end? I have begun to worry about this – and still in old age she moves and breathes all around me. On the beach, she walks head down into the wind, and the only part of our lives that feels safe, and has any kind of certainty, is the sea wind, and the giant mugs and the silver pot of tea.

Bandhu calls again and this time, Doreen is at home. He brings her a giant Elizabeth Arden make-up set and a bottle of Campari for Larry and me.

‘We can’t accept this,’ I tell her.

‘It’s an Indian custom,’ Doreen replies. ‘It would be very rude to refuse.’ Then I call Larry and ask him if he has ever heard about an Indian custom that involves Campari and Elizabeth Arden and he says, ‘It doesn’t sound very Hindu to me.’

My fear of water began in the shower. It took a whole day to install, my pappy, my brother Daniel and me. There were
phone calls from neighbours who asked, ‘Is it in yet?’ without saying their names or even ‘Hello’ first. The plumber was stopped and asked questions at our shop door. Dogs raced up and down the street and then barked back over their shoulders like they didn’t care, but they did. We were the first house in the town to have one and we boarded it like a spaceship.

‘Stand at the back,’ Pappy said. And then, ‘Are you ready?’ and without waiting for an answer he turned the water on. No one told me what it would be like. That I would be blasted by sudden jets of water. That they would hit me on the face and take the wind out of me. I was six and full of confidence then. I could sing every advertising jingle from the TV and when I called into Farrell’s clothes shop I did my Irish dancing up and down their floor.

In the shower there was steam and pounding water and noise and no way to escape. I couldn’t breathe and I turned my face into the corner and the water pounded my back. I turned around to face it but there was no air anywhere. I gave in quickly. I didn’t know how to have a shower so I caved in and sank down on to the floor.

‘For God’s sake,’ Pappy said and he reached in to turn the water off and I climbed out, humiliated, wearing a large floral shower cap and soap on a rope. Daniel looked out from under a white towel and held his hands out towards me. It was a gesture he used to show exasperation, confusion, annoyance, except now he used it and gave that funny infectious laugh of his as well. There was no half-way mark with Daniel’s laugh. It was either the funniest thing ever or not at all. Most of the time his own laughter forced him back into a chair.

Matilda knows all about my fear of water. She also knows where to get the best hotdog in New York. When Larry is working late I go to the Internet Café and we chat. She’s got a big job with the
New York Post
and I’ve already told her that I work in an advertising agency. When she asked what I do there I typed in ‘Managing Director’ and sent it back to her and she replied with one word: ‘Wow!’

The funny thing about emailing Matilda is that it’s easier to tell her things I still can’t tell anyone else. I think it’s because I have never actually seen her so I can’t imagine her eyes or if there is a smile or a frown on her face. One night I sat down and told her all about Pappy and Daniel and when I pressed ‘Send’ I thought I would never hear from her again. Then her reply came back with a ‘ping’ and the screen flashed on and it seemed to light up my life. She only wrote one line back but I printed it out and I still keep it in my bag.

‘
It wasn’t your fault
.’

That was all she said but it means an awful lot to me.

Sometimes if you blame yourself for something – and you keep it inside like a secret – and then someone says, ‘It wasn’t your fault’ – it seems to save your life.

The best hotdog in New York incidentally is at Gray’s Papaya on 71st and Broadway and it’s also the cheapest.