Read Playing with the Grown-ups Online
Authors: Sophie Dahl
Playing with the Grown-ups (7 page)
'Oh Kitty,' Rosaria said, 'I can come and stay in the Christmas holidays and we can ice skate in Central Park where we'll
bump into Johnny Depp and Luke Perry and they can take us to see
The Nutcracker,
after which we'll go to Studio
54
and dance all night.'
Kitty had a feeling Studio
54
was closed but she said nothing. She would love Rosaria for ever. Her haughtiness always made people stand down, even the
foulest teachers. When Kitty had babies Rosaria would be their godmother, she decided, and Kitty's children could wear her
shoes when they played dressing up.
The night before term ended, they played truth-or-dare. Kitty always chose truth, because she didn't have anything to lie
about yet.
'What turns you on?' Laura Hill asked.
'Oh you know, the usual things,' Kitty said in the dark.
'No, we don't know; it's specific to you, which is the whole point of the game. Don't be a bad sport.'
'Fine, well, OK, the usual things like that bit in
Lady Chatterly,
uh girls on page three who wear stockings and suspender belts, Seal and Adamski, that feeling when you go over a bridge, and
um . . . trains.'
The silence felt infinitely longer in the dark.
'Very strange, Kitty,' Imogen said. 'Very strange indeed.'
Kitty flushed.
'Well, what turns you on?'
'It's not my go, but, boys with blue eyes and dark hair, and Chris the Australian tennis instructor when he fingered me behind
the music room.'
'Gross, Imo,' Olivia said.
She and Rosaria perched awkwardly on Kitty's bed.
'Do you think you'll meet Mr Fitzgerald when you move to New York?' Olivia whispered.
'Unlikely. Besides, it would spoil his mystery.'
Rosaria and she held hands and cried as if the world would soon end.
'Promise you'll write every week.'
'I will write to you every week,' Kitty said.
Bestemama and Bestepapa had gone to a wedding in Sweden, and the local taxi driver drove her to the airport, after promising
Mrs Phelan he would see her to the door. The year's worth of belongings in her trunk felt insubstantial, as she pushed it
to the check-in desk.
Kitty felt nothing as the plane took off. Swami-ji had deemed it so and that was proof. The living, breathing, spiritual proof
that she had to come home. Perhaps he knew, in his infinite wisdom, that she would be a devoted devotee now, no longer mocking
his chanting, or thinking sexy thoughts while she meditated. If it meant she got to stay at home, Kitty decided she might
even shave her head, like his friends in the photographs.
She saw England beneath her, in miniature like a toy town.
Her mother would make up with Bestemama and Bes-tepapa, they would all have breakfast at Tiffany's. Rosaria could come for
the holidays. She would love it. Kitty knew it would all be fine, though she wished she had had her split ends trimmed in
the advent of seeing her mother. New York was magic, her mother had made this clear.
New York, home of the English muffin, the Beastie Boys, Central Park muggers and Victoria's Secret, and now Kitty. She turned
on her Walkrnan and smiled.
A
s they make their descent she sees green fields unfolding before her, the Thames curling its way through London, Windsor Castle
peering up from the mist. She has always imagined, from this vantage point, the London of Shakespeare, with boats carrying
people to where they are going, pickpockets and courtesans, streets screaming with mud and human traffic, the Rose Theatre
filled to the eaves with a jostling rowdy throng. Until they get closerto the cars and motorways, superstores and redbrick
houses spreading out as far as she can see, an industrious ant village beneath her, stamping on her fantasy.
Violet is pacing under the arrivals board. She is wearing a scarlet coat, and her thick black hair is pulled back in a ponytail.
Kitty marvels at how beautiful Violet is, and how unalike they are. Violet looks as though she has skipped off the pages of
The Arabian Nights, and Kitty feels, watching her, blonde, pale, pedestrian and very pregnant.
'Violet!' she calls quietly.
'Oh my God, Kitty! Here you are! And you're really truly pregnant!'
'I really am,' she says, and they hold one another.
* * *
Violet's car is a mess. Kitty squeezes herself in amidst Coke cans and magazines. Violet lights a cigarette, then she looks
stricken.
'Oh Christ, I forgot,' she says, going to stub it out.
'No please, breathe it all over me, it's been so long, and I could really use a vicarious fag.' Kitty breathes in the air
deeply, and fans the smoke towards her. 'See? I'm already treading the path of bad motherhood,' she says.
'You're going to be brilliant. You were born to be a mummy,' Violet answers, placing a placatory hand on her sister's belly.
T
he limestone house was as anonymous as a hotel. Kitty expected men in tails to appear from behind every corner with a handful
of Martinis or Earl Grey at teatime. It was just her mother and she though, swimming through the slippery heat of New York
in July. Violet and Sam had gone home with Nora to County Kerry, where they were, no doubt, eating soda bread piled thick
with Nora's mammy's gooseberry jam. Kitty discovered that in New York you could order food from a million different countries,
and it would show up on the doorstep within fifteen minutes.
'Mum, what's eggplant parmigiana?'
Her mother lay on the sofa in a lavender slip, slick with heat.
'Uh. Don't speak to me of food. It's so hot the thought of it makes me feel sick. Eggplant parmigiana is something that will
make you fat. It's deep-fried aubergines covered in cheese.'
Kitty thought it sounded delicious.
Her mother turned her head and looked at Kitty.
'I meant to tell you before, Kit-kat. You've grown a little chubby this past term. It would be good to lose it before school
starts in September.' Her eyes wound around Kitty's body.
'I don't think I have,' Kitty said, her voice echoing in the furnitureless room. 'I didn't mean to. I think it's this dress.'
'No, it's not the dress, it's definitely you, Magpie. Don't worry, we can lose weight together. I need to lose seven pounds.'
Marina poked at her washboard stomach critically.
In England they didn't have staff. They had Nora, who was family, and Mrs M from the village, who 'did' the cottage once a
week after she'd 'done' Hay House. In New York Vladimir, the silent Russian trainer, came every morning to define her mother,
as MTV blared in the background. Kitty put on a tracksuit and watched as he stretched and moved her mother like putty.
'You won't join?' he said, casting his melancholy black eyes at her.
'No, I'm going for a run actually,' Kitty said.
She hated running. She walked up and down Lexington Avenue, and bought Tasti D-Lite, the fat-free frozen yoghurt that was
everywhere in Manhattan, and sat on a step savouring each creamy mouthful.
Fat was to be avoided. Anything fat-free was acceptable. She read it in
Mirabella.
She counted calories voraciously. Her mother, at Vladimir's insistence, had bought a treadmill, and it had a built-in calorie
counter. As you ran, it told you how many calories you burned. Kitty loved to watch the numbers go up, so definite and sure.
One hundred, that was the bagel she had for breakfast; fifty, the apple she had for lunch. When you finished, it gave the
final calculation, with a red CONGRATULATIONS! that ran across the screen like a banner.
In the morning, Precious would come to clean the house, and bring her mother fruit on a tray. Precious was from Jamaica and
she thought her mother was really funny.
Kitty asked her questions, just so she could hear her speak, her words spilling over each other like a poem on speed.
'Why are you called Precious?'
'Because mi mammy tink it a beautiful name.'
'Where did she get it?'
'Oh you got chat, Kitty! From a perfume bottle, dat's where. Now move you skinny bum girl, you in my way.'
'Have I really got a skinny bum?'
'Too skinny. No Jamaican man ever want you with a bum like that. Someone tell you you fat?'
'My mum.'
'Your mum CRAZY. YOU not fat.'
By the end of the summer she weighed one hundred and five pounds. Twenty-five pounds less than her mother, and she was only
two inches taller. She was also fourteen pounds less than Jackie Kennedy when she lived in the White House, and Jackie, Kitty
noted with satisfaction, was renowned for being a sylph.
Her summer job was to reorganise her mother's Filofax. This was an arduous task, because her mother knew so many people. Kitty
had to ring them all to check that their phone numbers and addresses were current. This inevitably led to chat she did not
welcome.
'Kitty! How is Marina? Are you having the most glamorous time in New York? Is Marina still seeing the funny Indian man with
the turban? You must come and stay, darling, you're always welcome. Send Mummy our love.'
She simpered, 'Yes thank you, well, thank you, yes, it's great, really great.' Like a good child would, she thought, displeased
with herself. She started to pretend to be a French secretary to eradicate the possibility of these timely exchanges.
'Bonjour, I mean, 'ullo, I am Francine the secretary of Marina, would you please verify your address,
s'il vous plait?'
As Francine she did not have to have the long annoying chats. As Francine, Kitty idled with honeyed voice, and spent her afternoons,
and pocket money, on Third Avenue buying stripy tights from Hue.
On the top floor of the limestone mansion lived their landlord, Mr Frazi. Her mother told her that Mr Frazi was gay but she
was not to allude to it. Mr Frazi's apartment was smooth and polished and it smelled like birch trees and vetiver. He had
a butler named Philip who spoke no English, and they conversed through a tunnel of nods and smiles and sighs.
Mr Frazi usually spent his summers in the South of France or in Mykonos, but he had been hospitalised after a nasty asthma
attack, and been instructed by his doctors to rest in his fragrant tomb of an apartment.
Kitty longed for him to ask her to read the classics to him, like an old-fashioned ill person. He never did, but they spent
the close mornings together, drinking tea from bone china so thin it was almost see-through.
When her mother was locked away in her studio, Kitty called Hay House reverse charges, Bestepapa's voice billowing down the
phone, like a proud sail.
'We accept the charges. Put her through.'
She told him about Vladimir and Precious, tea with Mr Frazi and Philip. When she said it out loud it became full and round,
she could experience it again through the telling.
'Ibsen misses you,' Bestepapa said sadly. 'And Elsie's going out with a French pop singer with a moustache. Can you imagine?
Disgusting.' Kitty heard Bestemama chiding him gently in the background.
In New York the buildings were so high that you could see nothing about them but patches of sky. If Kitty looked up too long
it made her dizzy and anxious and she thought she would pass out.
'Don't look up then,' her mother laughed when Kitty told her.
'I have to. I have to know there's sky and grass beyond the buildings, otherwise I feel like a little ant.'
'My sweet country mouse, you'll get used to it. You just need to practise thinking that you're a New Yorker - they don't notice.'
Kitty's New York bedroom, up eighty-nine steps, was white as virgin's bones. Her bed was austere, dark-painted Victorian metal.
She liked it: boarding school had made her orderly. Kitty craved order and neatness and made her bed every morning with hospital
corners. Her mother found this inexplicably funny. Marina's bedroom was huge and paint-splattered. The bed looked like a confectioner's
dream. Frothy laced curtains and a sea of soft pillows bobbed around her head. She was a mermaid sleeping in an oyster shell.
Kitty's room seemed naked and unformed somehow, so she bought a stencil from the hardware store and painted hearts in pink
above the windows. The result, she thought savagely, looked like Heidi's room. She didn't finish it and five hearts floated,
unmoored, in the glaring white. In England her bedroom had always been the creative domain of her mother. Now there were choices.
She did not know what to do with such artistic freedom.
There was a huge rainstorm the night before Sam and Violet came back. The city was scorching all day, on the brink, like a
bowl about to break. Kitty lay in bed, between the worlds of dream and wake, where everything had melted, and hovered in magic
time.
'Kitty?' Her mother stood at the end of the bed. 'Do you want to come and see the rain? It's incredible. I've never seen anything
like it.'
They were both barefoot, and the street was hot and empty. The rain fell in slanted sheets, and the air was smoky, filled
with the smell of earth and pennies.
They spun around and around, water pouring down their faces, drenching them, an urban baptism.
'This is our life, can you believe it?' Faster and faster her mother spun, like a dervish. 'We're so lucky, and it's just
the beginning, Kitty, it's just the beginning of our new wonderful life. Can you believe it?'
Sam and Violet returned with Irish accents and freckles.
'Violet, Violet, we live in a feckin' mansion like Daddy Warbucks!' Sam flung his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack on
the marble floor. 'Howareya, Kitty?' he said.
'Cool house, right?' she said, shy of him.
Violet said, 'I'm only staying here if Sam and me have the same room.'
'Well that's a lucky thing, because you do. Have you said hello to your sister?' Her mother swooped down, scooped her up and
nuzzled her.
'No. Hi.' Violet buried her face in her mother's T-shirt.
'I remember you, from when I was a little girl. But now I'm big, so I don't remember you as well.'
'Well, I do,' Sam said.
'That's good,' Kitty said, because she couldn't think of anything else to say.
'Come on, skinny bones.' Nora passed Kitty a plate of her macaroni cheese. 'Eat up.'
'No, thank you, I don't want it.' Kitty handed it to Violet.
'Kitty, will you just eat the macaroni, I made it especially for you.'
A
vein throbbed in Nora's temple.
'But I don't want it. I'm not hungry.'
'What do you want?'
'Nothing. I'm not hungry.'
'But it's suppertime.'
'Just because its suppertime doesn't mean I have to be hungry. My stomach doesn't have a clock that says "Oh suppertime, I
must be hungry!" '
Sam found this hilarious.
' "Oh suppertime, I must be hungry! I'mso hungry1 could eat all of you, attack of the supper stomach monster." '
'Please will you eat some macaroni?' Nora enunciated each word. 'Stop it, Sam!'
'No,' Kitty said. 'None of you understand me! Why can't you understand?' She threw her chair back from the table and ran upstairs.
'Kitty?' Violet stood awkwardly at Kitty's side, clutching her fairy wings. 'You can have my fairy wings if you like. Look,
they're pink and very expensive, Mum said. I wore them at Halloween.'
'Are you sure?' Kitty said.
'Yes, positive.'
'Thank you. I think that's the loveliest present anyone's ever given me. I'll put them on my dressing table so I see them
every morning when I wake up, and every night before I go to sleep.'
'Aren't you going to wear them?'
'I will on special occasions. Like Christmas and my birthday.'
Violet smiled.
'Can I tell you a secret?' She leaned in towards Kitty and her breath was like strawberry saucers.
'I don't like macaroni either; I think it's horrible, like feet on mush. And last night, I stuck my finger up Sam's bum and
made him smell it.'
'I don't think you should do that any more,' Kitty said gravely.
'I know. It made him cry, and so I just gave him my witch's costume from the Halloween before I was a fairy. '
Violet lay down next to Kitty.
'Can I tell you something else? I do remember you from before, I just said I didn't. You used to play with us in the bath,
and you were really nice.' She flung her arms out and wriggled around like a sugary minnow. She threw her head down on Kitty's
chest.
'Ow, Violet! My bosoms. You have to be careful, they're growing . . .'
'Like rabbits. Oh, everything in my life is soft,' Violet said happily.
Kitty's thirteenth birthday arrived charitably to claim her on a Saturday.
It rained, a damp pervasive rain, and she skulked around the empty house like a ghost glaring out of the windows on to a sodden
New York, overcome with self-pity. In the kitchen she found Nora, who informed her that her mother was off doing 'birthday
things' and would be back at one.
When she looked sulky at this, Nora said, 'Lord, for goodness sake, the fuss you lot make about your birthdays. In my family
it was just a normal day.'
Her mother's surprises sometimes backfired. The year before, in child time a decade, on Sam and Violet's fifth birthday, she
took them to Disney World. Marina's best friend, Katie, flew out from England with her four-year-old daughter Lily. They wrapped
Lily up in a box festooned with ribbons and presented it to Sam. Her mother's sense of excitement mounted.
Sam had marched around the box like a little general, prodding at it with relish.
As
Lily burst out, 'the present' in a Cinderella costume, Sam looked at first bewildered, and then seriously cheated.
'Oh hi,' he said, and departed to play with his Lego in the walk-in wardrobe.
'But, darling, it's Lily,' Marina said sadly.
'I haven't seen her since I was a baby and she's wearing a Cinderella costume,' he answered as he shut the door.
Her mother arrived home at three.
'Fine birthday this is,' Kitty muttered as she jangled in, bracelets and curls and a cloud of scent.
'Oh don't be cross. Violet, Sam and I have bought you a surprise.'
"Lo, Kitty,' said Sam in his deep teddy-bear voice.
'Kitty, we got you a present,' Violet said. 'But we liked it so much, I got one too.'
'Actually, Violet, we are sharing it,' Sam said.
Marina led her to the sitting room and covered Kitty's eyes with her hands.
'Tada!' she said.
A fat white Persian cat sat on a pink cushion. The cat and Kitty looked at each other with distaste. She didn't quite trust
cats, she realised. Dogs were much more straightforward.
'Mine is called Bruce,' Violet told her.
'Brutus,' corrected Sam.
'Bruce,' Violet said, dancing around him.
They flew off downstairs to the nursery like flames.