Sensitive Skin 3

Morning Sunshine

My name is Violet. I’m married to Tom and I’m old and I’d like to say that’s how I introduce myself to people, but it would be a lie. I’m of no interest to anyone, not even Tom, who has heard all my anecdotes so many times that he corrects me when I get the details wrong. Which I, quite deliberately, do.

I am sitting in the fairly chilly conservatory today in an attempt to start writing my memoirs, and if I ever manage to finish writing them, I’m going to walk out of the door of this house, leave Tom behind, and start living. That’s the promise I’ve made to myself. It’s probably a good idea to password protect my profile if I’m really going to go ahead with this. Tom wouldn’t be too pleased with this statement. Not that he’d take it seriously, of course.

Right now he’s in the dining room finishing his boiled egg. He cramps my style with his devotion to the truth; he would look over my shoulder if he knew I was writing my life story, and have everything recorded the way he remembered it.

Maybe we’d agree on the bare bones: I was born, I got married, I had three children, I raised them, they left, I retired, Tom retired, we sat around and tried not to die. Yes, we could probably agree on that.

But the truth is aIso this: the only other piece of creative writing I’ve ever done happened in the week when my youngest started school. I wrote a long, long list - places I wanted to go, people I wanted to meet, things I wanted to see before it was too late. And now that it really is too late, I don’t see what harm it does to write a memoir in which I achieved all of those things.

For instance - The Taj Mahal was a huge white ship on the azure sea-sky. I swear it rocked and swayed on the waves of adulation that kept it monumental. It had a certain song to it that I hear sometimes, at night, through the open window.
At a dinner party overlooking Martha’s Vineyard (she grew wonderful grapes) I turned once to Peter Ustinov and asked him if I should endeavour to tell the truth in all things, and he said something so incredibly witty that I can’t record it here in case your head should explode. Three people at the dinner party laughed so hard they had to be given emergency aspirin, and that included Mother Theresa.

I saw the removal van yesterday and assumed Stephen was leaving until I saw the blanket box going in. The woman watching from the doorway of number five was unremarkable, but something about her reminded me of Libby – I think it was the way of standing, shoulders pulled back, as if on a military parade ground. Has Stephen found a replacement so soon?

Anyway, I can’t go and find out the truth about Stephen. A different kind of person can turn up at a house, knock on the door, and with a bare smile as a disguise demand answers. It needs someone like Dan. It didn’t surprise me when he muscled his way in there.

Dan reminds me of a toffee apple. He’s so shiny on the outside, and he smells so good, but he’s still, at heart, just as bruised as the rest of us. The woman at number five will enjoy his company for a while, and no doubt discard him later, once she discovers the extent of the damage. Unless she happens to like bruised apples. There’s no accounting for taste.

I once ate the eyes of a tortoise at the behest of a Bahraini Sheikh. It wasn’t even a delicacy; he just felt like setting a test, to see how far he could push me. It was that kind of a relationship. So I popped them in my mouth, quick, and he was so entertained by the face I pulled that he gave me the blinded tortoise as a gift. I took the tortoise back to Chelmsford (I was living in a bed-sit on the grottier side of town back then) and called it Oedipus. It lived for years, and I felt a stab of guilt every time it weaved its little head from side to side, like Stevie Wonder riding a melody.

From my wicker seat - I never noticed before quite how uncomfortable wicker is – I have a good view of the Crescent by the light of another indistinguishable morning. With my laptop open and ready to receive my thoughts, I find myself ruminating on my neighbours as they come and go, forming a tiny corner of a global pattern, like the tiny squares that make up lino. They have such busy lives, and all seem to have a purpose. Dan often runs up and down the street in tiny shorts, only warming up, no doubt, before the big sprint through the park to keep his figure. Young sweaty bodies are so pink and wet and agile, like salmon jumping upstream. I can’t even jump out of this chair.

So what is the truth? If this sounds like a deep question with which to begin a memoir, I can assure you, dear reader, that it is not. I’m saying – these are memories of things that did not happen. Relics of daydreams. But as much effort went into making them as everybody else put into living, so I don’t see why they should be classified as lies.

I’m glad Stephen has someone to care for him. But I wonder if a bout of good old sex with a prostitute wouldn’t have done him the world of good too. It certainly helped me back in my New York days, when I came across a gorgeous American Gigolo who happened to look a lot like Richard Gere hanging out in a bar, took him home and got up to all sorts with him. It was such a shame when he got falsely accused of murder and had to go on the run.

There’s a crisp packet stuck in my front hedge. I’d better go and fish it out. It’ll be a bit of exercise for me. And then there’s flower arranging at the Garden Centre. Fliss will be talking about oral sex or some such and Diana will be as miserable as usual. Still, it beats being at home.

Golly, you know, I feel like quite a different person on the page. I’m enjoying myself. Of course, there’ll have to be a lot of editing, but I think I’ll push on with this project. Maybe, at the end of it, I’ll act on one of my daydreams and actually leave.

*

From her position on the living room window seat, her book abandoned in her lap. Alice observed the delicate operation of a removal of the crisp packet.

The old woman in the mustard coloured jacket leaned forward over the box hedge, overbalanced, and then spent a full minute extricating herself. When she managed to get back on her feet her coat was decorated in privet, and her long grey hair was loose and wispy on one side. She was a doll of a lady, Alice thought; precise little movements and pursed lips, as she watched the ritual of dusting down and readjusting of the hair. The crisp packet was held in one fist, crushed, and there was a triumphant air about her.

Alice went to the door and out into the front garden, picking a good vantage point between Libby’s carefully made flowerbeds. She pretended to examine the lawn, pushing a tuft of weed with her toe. It was quite warm, unusually so for March, and the sun was giving its all to getting the day started. The brightness of the day had excited the small birds nesting in the trees at the centre of the Crescent, and they cheeped with wild, party-like abandon. Alice breathed in the air and felt springtime crowding in close to her, and she felt happiness even though she was well aware that she was a terrible person and had to right to experience joy at all.

‘We never worked out how much you’d get paid,’ had been Steven’s first words to her that morning.
She’d kept her cool as she sidestepped him and reached for the kettle. ‘Now, you see, what you’ve gone and done by making that the first thing we talk about this morning, is you’ve made me feel like a prostitute. Was that your intention?’

‘Of course not!’ He’d shook his head and put up his hands up as if to say please go easy on me, I’m having such a hard time, and she’d felt terrible for him, for what he had done last night and how he had to feel about it. So she’d named a weekly amount that was half the price she’d had in mind, and he’d agreed to it. He left for work silently, creeping away, like a prisoner who’d just made parole.

A quick search of the cupboards had revealed a squashed packet of mint tea, and Alice had drunk it without wanting to examine exactly why she wasn’t having her usual cup of coffee. The feeling of being pregnant was a cross between a bursting sense of infinite possibilities and a bout of constipation. She had been struggling all morning with the alternating urges to run to the nearest chemist and stock up on folic acid, and stare at her belly button with a serene expression.

Life, and its insistence on everyone living it, carring on, moving down the line to the next stop, was horribly pervasive.

Alice stopped kicking at the grass and decided to take control of the situation.

‘Hello?’ she called. She had been made brave. There were so many other important things to think about than social embarrassment, and she desperately wanted to have a conversation in which she didn’t feel like an evil, corrupting whore. ‘Hi? Hello?’

The old lady turned around and fixed surprisingly doe-like eyes on Alice. She scrunched up the crisp packet and pushed it into the pocket of her mustard coat. Alice walked across the road to her, around the tweeting birds in the baby trees, and put on her best smile.

‘I’ve just moved in,’ she said, ‘I just wanted to say hello. I’m Alice.’

The lady nodded. ‘Alice.’

‘Is your name Alice too? How funny!’

‘No, no, you’re Alice,’ said the lady. ‘I’m Violet. This is me.’ She pointed to the house behind her. It had rows of purple plants in the front garden, neat and obeisant. Alice thought they might even be African violets, but that seemed like too much of a coincidence to bring up in conversation. ‘I was so sorry about your sister.’

‘Thanks.’

‘News travels quickly around here. Are you settled in? Or I suppose it’s still early days.’ She said everything in a rush, wincing, as if it hurt her to indulge in small talk and she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
‘Yes, fine, thank you, but I wondered if you knew where the nearest Chemist’s was?’ Alice said, just to keep the conversation going, really.

‘Ooh, end of the road, turn left, past the train station and keep walking into town, not far, and it’s next to Budgens. Nothing wrong, is there? I have some paracetamol, or a plaster, I’m quite happy to fetch them for you.’

‘No no.’ She cast around for something else to say. Had she come out here looking for a confidante? But now she was out here, it was ridiculous to imagine she could say, listen, I made a huge mistake last night and I think I might have to pay for it for the rest of my life. ‘Did you know Libby well?’

‘Not really,’ said Violet, ‘just to say hello to. It’s only once something like this happens that you realise you missed the opportunity to speak up.’

‘To speak up?’

‘To say hello. To be friends. So you don’t just give a quick wave from across the road, you know. So you’re not familiar with Bourne End at all, then?’

‘No,’ Alice said. The sun wasn’t quite as warm as she had thought, not on this side of the street, anyway. She wished she hadn’t bothered coming out at all. ‘I was in London, before.’

‘How lovely!’

‘I don’t know. I can think of better places to live. Have you always lived around here?’
Violet’s face screwed up tight, collapsing inwards. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘always here. There’s the Budgens and the Co-op and the Garden Centre is nice. Go right to the fork in the road and then left. If you’re a garden person. There are meetings and things.’

‘Oh good.’

‘You can come, if you’d like,’ said Violet. ‘There’s one this morning. I know, I’ll walk along with you to the Chemist’s and then show you. You can join in.’

‘Well, I…’

‘I’ll just get my keys,’ she said, and was charging back up the path to her house with that blinkered urgency which seemed to afflict the old. Alice waited. It wasn’t as if she’d been given a choice.