Copycat (3 page)

Well, naturally I was indignant. I’d been spoken to like a child, but I managed to rise above it because my main concern was getting to the loo for that first morning cigarette.

As I passed Jennie’s bed, fags deep in Sam’s dressing-gown pocket, she whispered to me with her eyes tightly closed, ‘That’s it. Never again.’

One of the first subjects Jennie brought up was the way she was bullied at school. I think she had a thing about this and it influenced all her behaviour.

We were in her house at the time, in her bedroom. I sat on Graham’s side of the bed while she, with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, sat beside me bottle-feeding Poppy after a careful sterilization routine. With her hairline reduced by the towel Jennie looked almost childlike, quite impish. And with her small bones and snub nose she put me in mind of a freckled pixie. ‘Why did they pick on me?’ she asked, still bewildered all these years later. ‘I didn’t stand out in any way. I wasn’t fat or spotty or smelly, I didn’t have a squint or a harelip. They were girls I’d had to my party, and they made fun of my mother.’

‘What was wrong with your mother?’ I teased, my sticky nipple in greedy Scarlett’s mouth. I was always finished way before Jennie because it was essential that Poppy drained the lot, was winded at least six times during her feed and by the time the torment ended Jennie’s lips were as sore as my tits; she bit them continuously. She kept Lipsalve in the pocket of her special feeding apron. She changed the brand of milk weekly, even venturing into goat’s when Poppy went through a long phase of colic.

‘Nothing was wrong with my mother,’ she snapped. ‘That was what made it hurt more. My mother was really trying, she’d made such an effort to get everything right. My God, how I hated kids’ birthday parties, but you had to have them and you had to go to other people’s if you were invited. Does any kid honestly like them?’

‘I did.’

‘Honestly?’

‘I was a pig. I went for the food and the presents.’

Jennie propped Poppy against her hand and the baby burped and puked. Jennie looked worried. ‘Damn damn damn.’ Her agitation was catching. ‘I’m going to get no sleep again tonight.’

‘Leave her downstairs where you can’t hear her. It won’t hurt her – not as much as you being so tired.’

Of course she didn’t listen to me, why would she? Letter by letter, word by word, Jennie was following the latest book. Following rules, like believing in God, like measuring recipes, like testing her hair before colouring, was an essential part of her nature.

‘My mother had veins on the back of her legs.’

I looked at my own. ‘Join the club.’

‘No, Martha, not veins like that. Horrible wormy veins. She was always in having them done. She had to wear special stockings. It was the veins they started whispering about – Barbara Middleton and Judith Mort.’

She even remembered their names. ‘Kids are so foul.’

‘They scrawled on the blackboard, thin wispy scrawls with red and blue chalk. Nobody knew what they were but me. And they wrote underneath in mauve, “legs eleven”. But they didn’t stop there, they went on and on.’

‘Only because you let them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You should have fought back. Thrown their books down the loo.’

‘And then some other kids joined them. People I thought were my friends.’

‘Picking on somebody else is a way to make sure they don’t pick on you.’

‘I know, I know.’ At last Poppy drained that dratted bottle. Jennie tried to smile, a tired one, purified by pain. She started to tidy her layette, a basket in pink waterproof gingham in which she kept her oils and creams, half-opened packs of this and that, sacred ceremonial ointments. ‘It sounds obvious now, but it wasn’t then. I used to break my heart at night thinking how hurt Mum would be if she knew. She kept asking me what was the matter. She asked so gently, so tenderly, how could I explain?’

That first spring at Mulberry Close was so wet the earth gave out seaside smells and the rain went on interminably. To venture out meant getting covered in mud. The heart-shaped leaves of the mulberry tree which stood on the green in the centre were splashed with tar and cement. Sam could do nothing with the new garden. The clay was too heavy to move, so the patio slabs, the sand and cement stayed stacked at the back of the garage, and when the roses arrived in their little brown sacks we dumped them in the shed and forgot them.

I grew fatter and slacker and more depressed, while next door Jennie smiled radiantly and oozed with an eerie confidence, her whole house organized to create an aura of peace and goodwill.

On the few dry days her washing was out on the line by eight thirty. Although it never properly dried outside, she disapproved of stringing it, dripping, round the kitchen as I did.

I was the only one allowed to peep behind this maternal serenity and this was because, with my Safeway bag full of Pampers nappies, my dribbled-on bibs and sticky dummies, I was no competition.

For Jennie everything had to be right.

When Poppy caught chickenpox, every individual spot was dabbed at with the calamine while I watched in mad exasperation.

The towels in her bathroom matched her flannels.

Her kitchen sink stayed clear of dishes and her windows sparkled.

She needed to be reassured that she was a marvellous mother and she was, at some cost to herself as, like a superhuman, she liquidized all Poppy’s food, had her weighed weekly, boiled her snow-white terry nappies, disinfected rattles and crept round the house while her baby slept, with her voice in mellow mode. But she was draining her own vitality.

Everything was done to rote, nothing was ever spontaneous.

‘Isn’t this lovely?’ she seemed to be asking. ‘Look – I am a safe and natural mother.’

But she wasn’t safe. Not safe at all.

I thought of her mother’s terrible veins and wondered how she got them because Jennie, programmed like this, was following some destructive pattern.

If I encouraged her to try to relax she would twist and protest with all the strain showing. ‘Let Graham help more,’ I suggested. ‘He’s a genuine new man. You should make more of him. Now if you had Sam as a partner, I could understand the state of your nerves.’

‘What state of nerves?’ she’d ask sharply, biting a trembling lip.

In the end, seeing she was close to collapse, I ordered her to sit down.

‘I’d better not drink,’ she sniffed when I offered her wine, head down like a sulking bird.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Get this down you and stick your feet up on this chair.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she groaned. ‘Mothering comes so naturally to you. It ought to be such a simple thing. But Scarlett’s such an easy baby, she’s never woken more than twice a night.’

‘I find her almost impossible to cope with,’ I told Jennie truthfully.

With a voice contorted with fresh distress she confided her terrible secret. ‘What would you say if I told you I sometimes hate Poppy so much, I’m frightened I’m going to kill her?’

‘I’d say you were normal,’ I answered, amazed that she thought otherwise.

‘If I said that to Graham he’d never understand. He would think I was a freak.’

‘If only you’d stop pretending,’ I said.

And I wondered in how many other ways Jennie and Graham pretended. And why.

I made her go out, to fetch stamps from the post office. She hadn’t left her house since coming home from the hospital after the birth. ‘Walk, take your time, don’t use the car.’ Such a little step. I made her leave Poppy with me.

She came back happier but fearing corruption.

And the next step after that was enrolling for aerobics.

Sam said, ‘Why is that damn woman always here when I come home? And she looks so sheepish, as if she’s doing something wrong. I don’t know how to react to her, she seems shy and uncomfortable with me.’

‘That’s because you’re so gruff,’ I said. ‘Not everyone appreciates your sick sense of humour. Be gentler with her. And perhaps we should have them over for supper.’

‘Oh no…’

‘Don’t start. We could ask the Fords, too. I think Jennie is lonely, out of her depth. I mean, she cries if her cakes don’t rise and she has no-one but me to talk to.’

‘We don’t want to live in the neighbours’ pockets,’ Sam said predictably, ‘nor do we want to get involved.’

‘It would be the first time that poor woman has left her house at night since Poppy arrived,’ I informed him. ‘I’m going to suggest a babysitter.’

‘Martha, I just can’t face it. She’d bring the wretched child with her.’

So that was how it first started, ten years ago.

Life with Jennie was never easy, but the fatal cracks appeared much later.

When Mrs Forest rang me up I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

I was stunned. ‘But Jennie Gordon’s a friend of mine, she only lives next door. If this bullying has been going on for so long, why the hell didn’t she tell me?’

‘She says she did bring the subject up, but that you took it very lightly,’ said the teacher. ‘All I can say is, apparently Poppy has been frightened to come to school from the beginning of this term. Yesterday afternoon she went missing.’

‘Because of Scarlett?’ Ridiculous!

The telephone hummed with tension. There must be some misunderstanding. Scarlett and Poppy, inseparable since infancy, had their desks moved last term to stop their endless gossiping. They chose to open their Christmas presents in each other’s bedrooms. They insisted on the same hairstyles. Snow White and Rose Red they might be, but somehow they managed to look alike.

‘I think you and I need to talk this over,’ said Mrs Forest sympathetically. ‘Come into school and collect Scarlett early.’

Stranger and stranger. As I backed out my car I thought I saw a movement of curtains at number one. Jennie was nervous. More persecution, more victimization, and I began to wonder if victims were made by a parent’s genes or some unidentified chemical.

And I think she never learned how to love.

A
ND I THINK SHE
never learned how to love.

By some kind of mystic osmosis the Frazers drew their neighbours around them like the Lord drew his disciples, like bony prophets drew frenzied crowds to their deserts of biblical brown.

Come unto me and I will refresh you.

Not a bad thing if you’ve got the knack, but me, I grew irrationally jealous, gleaning my pleasures from pain as Martha would later put it.

At least the Frazers’ popularity and Martha’s slatternly nature meant that the Close escaped the compulsion to compete with the proverbial Joneses. The Frazers drove an expensive Cherokee jeep which they never cleaned, inside or out; it was filthy and pranged in several places. Instead of buying a second car Martha ran Sam to work every morning – no more than a ten-minute drive – while back at home there’d be some calamity: her washing machine would be flooding the floor, she’d have let a stew boil over. Rather than a costly playhouse with a gate and pretend garden flowers, their kids used a ramshackle den built by Sam, with corrugated iron as a roof and walls made of rough bits of four-by-two nailed together. Martha refused a cleaner. The poor woman wouldn’t have known where to start. They owned a ride-on mower but it leaked petrol and rarely worked.

Their magnetism was a mystery to me. Although they weren’t a glamorous couple, they had this charismatic, enchanted quality which I so envied but couldn’t define and which I remembered meeting before at the miniature desks of childhood. To be around these special people gave you an air of exultation. Excluded, you could feel neutralized.

The green-door factor.

The door was built with clever whispers.

The door was chained by knowing eyes.

You had to know the password.

Ostentatious they were not, but the Frazers certainly went short of nothing. Sam was in fashionable advertising and the name of his company sometimes rolled by in the credits on ITV, but in spite of this Martha dressed like a gypsy, choosing outlandish material and running up her own flowing clothes – vivid, sloppy and tasty like burnt home-made sweets – and her kids lived in patched dungarees, baggy jumpers and multi-coloured boots.

Natural taste, I thought to myself, knowing that I had none.

She went to the hairdresser only once a year to have her curly black locks cut short.

She was quickly bored.

She blossomed in company.

She collected cats and her homely house had a feral smell about it.

I felt a pleasant kick of satisfaction each time I was included in Martha’s disorganized plans, but I couldn’t escape the slump of misery when the Frazers were asked to supper by my neighbouring rivals.

Yes, it’s true and I have to admit it, I saw them as rivals right at the start of my friendship with Martha.

I was haunted by the most ludicrous trivia.

Unable to keep my distress to myself, I would moan to Graham with my voice mean and sharp. ‘Why the hell would they want to go round to the Wainwrights’ again when Martha swears she can’t stand him? She calls him the flasher because of his mac.’

And:

‘Fancy Christine inviting Scarlett to Jody’s sixth birthday party. Scarlett’s a baby…’

Or:

‘Martha says she feels sorry for Tina, that’s why she keeps going round for coffee. That’s the trouble with Martha, everyone wants her. She makes them laugh.’

Graham protested between the silvery bones of his morning kipper. ‘Does it matter? Do you care? Why are you so bothered about what Martha Frazer is up to? You spend most of your time round there gossiping, anyway. I should think you’d be glad of a chance to catch up.’

‘What do you mean, catch up?’
This, as always, hit a raw nerve. I was always well ahead of myself. Like his mother, Ruth, and my own mother, Stella, I kept a neat and tidy house.

‘By the way you keep tabs on Martha anyone would think you were jealous.’

This accusation came as a shock. ‘That’s absurd. Of course I’m not jealous.’

‘Well then, leave it alone. What does it matter to you if Martha’s garden is littered with kids? You wouldn’t want them round here. If she doesn’t mind the mess and the mud, good luck to her. She’s crazy.’