The Cornflake House (17 page)

As I said, I saw Mum falter for a second while she chose her tickets. I knew something was up and was disappointed but not surprised when we won, not the doll but a bottle of home-made elderberry wine, undrinkable stuff unless your name is Taff and you visit friends at Christmas and consume everything in sight. The doll went to an old man in a Panama hat. He looked baffled rather than pleased by his win. I remember following him around the fête for the greater part of the afternoon. The soles of the doll's pale pink plastic shoes stuck out under his arm, enticing as ice-cream. He only put the doll down once, while he bought himself a cup of tea, and as I sneakily touched her nylon hair with my fingertips, I marvelled on life's injustices.

The holiday was similar. Mum won it for me because I needed a break from home, but she couldn't bring herself to spoil me even then, so she won a second-rate stay in a cheap part of Spain. I was recovering from glandular fever and a broken heart at the time. Either of these infirmities can lay a teenage girl low for weeks. Put the two together and your patient may seem to be terminally ill.

In my case the glandular fever came first, leading, through my absence from the social whirl of early evening parties and Youth Club, to loss of love and the breaking of my frustrated heart.

The name of the love in question was Marcus Zimmer. An exotic boy, self-assured, easy on the eye. Smooth is the word for him, a smooth operator with shining, unruffled hair and the olive skin of a Greek god. To this day I've never seen eyelashes to match his, or a pair of legs so beautiful.

‘Oh dear,' Mum said, putting her arm around my shoulders on the Saturday Marcus and his family moved into the house opposite ours. I was ten at the time and he was twelve. As those long, tanned legs darted in and out of his front door, exploring his new space, I was no less thrilled than if I'd suddenly sighted deer running through Fisher's Close.

It was spring and we'd just inherited a horse from an unknown benefactor. Mum had whispered to me that she believed it had been left in our garden by Django's father, the Gypsy. As she rarely mentioned fathers, I'd felt a current of excitement and envy when told this. I couldn't stretch my imagination far enough to guess what kind of present my own dad might have brought for me, but I longed for something as big and mysterious as the horse to arrive from him. Ironically, of all us children, Django was the least interested in the horse; he might have liked it, had it run on electricity, but flesh and blood meant nothing to him. The poor horse was groomed until he was sore that day. I stood brushing his coat, unmatting his mane, untangling his tail, my eyes on the house opposite, my mind intent on the affect I was having on that tantalizing new boy. I was hot and uncomfortable, having changed, inappropriately for playing at being a groom, from my habitual shorts and tee-shirt into a long sleeved blouse and an embroidered skirt. The skirt was the only one, apart from my grey school uniform, that I possessed. Not only was I baking, I grew cross too, with the horse who, being tempted by the long grass of our front garden, refused to keep his head up. Then I was angry with Merry who insisted on using my bent back as a springboard from which to mount the horse. The animal itself was nothing more or less than a slide to Merry. Then, to top it all, Django appeared:

‘Are you going country dancing?' he asked me.

I shook my head, trying to push him away with my free hand.

‘Only you said last week,' Django spoke loudly and much too clearly, ‘that you hated that silly skirt because it stuck out like a lampshade, and Mum told you that everyone has to wear stuff they hate for country dancing, and you said all right but not at any other time and now you've got it on and you're not even going…'

‘Here,' I pulled a bribe from my pocket and handed it to him, ‘take this and go away.' He did. I always kept some parts of a vacuum cleaner handy, they were essential tools for those who wanted a quiet life.

What can Marcus have thought of us? A family of tramps with a horse and an old cream caravan in our front garden. We also kept chickens, just a small clutch. They were pets really, we ate their eggs but not their flesh. Each had a name and a personal space in the caravan, now doubling up as a hen-house. Taff was staying with us when one snowy white hen, glorying in the name of Ariadne, passed away. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, especially from Zulema who claimed, posthumously, that Ariadne had been her own darling chick. So grief-sticken was my beautiful but over-emotional sister that she fetched from our bedroom a large wooden treasure chest, from which she'd emptied her many bracelets and hairbands. With due ceremony the limp corpse was placed in this container and carried, followed by a procession of sombre-faced children, through the kitchen where Taff was chopping vegetables and wondering what else to give us for dinner.

‘What you got there?' Taff asked.

‘Ariadne,' I whispered, Zulema having been rendered speechless by her grief.

‘Arry had what?'

‘One of the chickens, she's dead.' I didn't expect Taff to share our sorrow, but I wasn't prepared for her flippancy either.

‘Problem solved,' she beamed, ‘guess what we'll have for dinner?'

Fourteen eyes stared at her in horror.

‘Chicken in the casket.'

She was humming as she turned back to her parsnips and swedes. We reckoned, as we dug a hole in the grass, that Taff had been only joking but Ariadne was still laid to rest with undignified haste.

Later, because we hadn't pressed the turf down over the grave, one of the dogs dug her up and, having opened the chest with his nose, dragged the dead bird around until the garden looked like the floor of a chicken plucking factory. When she recovered, Zulema, being a rare combination of emotional and practical, rescued her treasure chest, cleaned it and eventually filled it once more with beads and baubles which were easier on the eye and a lot less smelly than a dead chicken.

Ariadne's sister, or auntie, or grandmother, Henrietta (Fabian's choice of name), was pecking about on the doorstep while I groomed the horse and gazed across the road. For the first time I was touched with shame. Those trim houses, our neighbour's gardens with water fountains and up-and-over garage doors, they didn't look so bad after all. Why hadn't we got a car, a red one to shine in our drive? I stood dejected, avoiding the horse's droppings, and surveyed The Cornflake House. Everything was chipped, overgrown, tatty. When was Mum going to get the window mended? That cardboard blocking the hole looked ghastly, especially as it was the side of a box which had once carried toilet rolls and said so in glaring red lettering.

Amazingly, my luck was in. Marcus wasn't necessarily impressed by me, but he thought the horse was wonderful. I gasped as I saw those legs crossing the tarmac to our house.

‘Do you use him to pull your cart?' he asked, having introduced himself and got a muttered ‘Eve' out of me. It took a couple of seconds for light to dawn, then I instantly wished for the return of dimness. He really did think we were tinkers, scrap merchants, rag-and-bone folks. Blushing to my scalp, I looked down at my filthy feet which were only inches from the horse's latest offering. Finally I managed to move my head stiffly from side to side. Marcus was patting the horse, smiling like a toothpaste advertisement. For once I was glad to see Django, who reappeared by my side.

‘Your legs are like polished wood,' he told Marcus, a comment so true it made me snort, a sound Marcus misinterpreted as laughter. We made
him
laugh anyway, between us, Django and I.

After that I led Marcus inside to meet the rest of my family, introducing him proudly, as if I'd crafted him myself. Later we named the horse together, first bouncing ideas around each other, then offering the animal the chance to show his approval or otherwise by chanting into his nostrils. He seemed to like Cecil, so Cecil he was. I longed for Monday and a chance to display Marcus at school, but his parents were rich enough to pay for his education and he was whisked away in a smart black Rover while I sat waiting for my bus. It took me four years to win his heart: twelve school terms, much trickery and many temptations to make him mine. For some reason I assumed that he would love me if I was weaker and more sickly than I appeared to be and I was often to be found limping, coughing and generally fading to a mere shadow in his presence. None of this had any affect, of course. It was money that brought him to my side; it finally happened on another spring Saturday.

Saturdays. Do you remember those teenage Saturdays? The agony of being left dateless and at home while the world partied. The ecstasy of having somewhere to go and somebody worth going there with. Throughout the week it loomed, Saturday night, either empty and depressing as death, or too golden, too frenzied for a soul to bear. At fourteen I felt the degradation of being housebound and boyfriendless on Saturdays profoundly. My problem was being a close neighbour of the boy I loved. How could I forget Marcus and flirt contentedly with less exceptional beings when I saw him every day? Six days of the week I was filled with dreams and possibilities but when Saturday came around I was forced to face a cold truth; I was getting nowhere. I never asked my mother to help, not in Marcus's case. It mattered too much, I needed to know that I'd succeeded or failed by myself. It was first love, and it hurt like hell.

Lord knows how I came to be at the bus stop alone, without the usual flock of relatives in tow, on that fateful Saturday morning, but there I sat, dangling my legs, picking at the oak tree's bark. There was a stop but no shelter, so those of us who waited for the cantankerous number sixty-three, the bus to Woking, used the oak as seat and canopy. In its early days this vast tree must have suffered from a trauma because its trunk grew along the ground, not upwards, for the first six feet, then it turned at a relieved right angle and did what trees should do, pointed to the sky. It made a perfect bench, a seat smoothed by the bottoms of many reluctant schoolchildren. Buses were stubborn in those days, in that part of the world. Although the sixty-three had to chug up the hill, passing Fisher's Close at about two miles an hour, it didn't stop by our houses. As they hadn't been built when the route was laid out, they were ignored. The driver would stop on remote corners to let old women off or to drop more privileged children at their doors, but only if these remote corners had been inhabited from the day that buses were invented. Kindly, obstinate and never, ever on time, that was the sixty-three.

For me, bus travel, kissing and Murray Mints are inextricably linked. I used to suck those smooth, oval sweets as I waited in my leafy shelter; and I'm almost certain that there was a slip of one left in my mouth when Marcus finally shuffled along to find my lips with his. If we were playing Botticelli, if Marcus was a sweet, he'd be a Murray Mint, flawless, flavoured to the core. Add to this the way the sixty-three bus was bullet shaped, cream with green trim, and considered itself too good to hurry, and you have an explanation that would have satisfied Freud himself.

I've almost managed to blank from my memory the fact that Marcus, unusually, was broke that morning and needed to borrow the bus fare. I was the only other passenger, so he asked me for a loan, after he had kissed my astonished lips. I would have walked the five miles to town, gladly waving
my
fare goodbye, for that kiss; but I'd begun working, babysitting for local families, and was wealthy enough for two. We rode side by side, both hushed by what had passed between us; I guess, while I was stunned with pleasurable surprise, Marcus was perplexed by his foolhardiness. He'd needed only to ask and I would have handed him my life's savings; but he had kissed me. A kiss was a seal, it meant much, much more than it does now. You didn't press your lips against another's unless you intended to be, if only for a short time, theirs.

And mine he was, as we ambled around Woking that Saturday morning. I meant to buy personal items, sanitary towels for my new status as a woman with periods, Amplex tablets in case … but too late for that now. Not having the courage to visit Boots the chemist with Marcus, I spent my money on records – the ones he liked – and refreshments for both of us. The coffee bar and the park were meeting places for young people; my dreams came true as I sat first on painted chairs drinking a steaming, frothy cappuccino, then on damp grass licking an ice lolly, showing Marcus off to girls my age or older. A return journey on the sixty-three took us to his house to listen to the new records. Everything he owned, including his record player, was more modern and expensive than in The Cornflake House. We'd managed to reduce our own prize gadgets to scrap by then.

I'd not been invited inside Marcus's house before; I hadn't expected ever to walk through that front door. As I did, I had my first encounter with good taste. His mother had chosen furniture, wall and floor coverings and each of her ornaments with extreme care. Even the books might have been selected for the beauty of their spines. The rooms had colour themes, blues shading from delphinium to forget-me-not in the dining room, a bright green and white kitchen and grey walls with red paintwork in Marcus's bedroom – in which, I hasten to add, we merely lounged and listened.

Later, being mine, Marcus suggested we go to Youth Club together. Saturday night, a date, and no Amplex tablets; my heart wasn't so much racing as speeding dangerously. I staggered across the road to attempt the impossible conversion of self into superstar. After several hours of bathing, shampooing and worrying, I looked much the same as before, only redder in the face from steam and stress. It's hard to imagine, it wasn't easy to believe at the time, but we, the world's most unlikely couple, had fun together. Carried on a high of disbelief, exhilaration and vodka, stolen from his father's drinks cabinet and slipped into my orange juice by my thoughtful date, I sailed through the evening, not the most beautiful girl in the church hall but by far the most amusing. When Marcus kissed me goodnight on The Cornflake House porch, it was with less caution and more enthusiasm than at the bus stop. An even stronger seal. We were a pair, boyfriend and girlfriend, and although I was delirious with joy I didn't think I was kidding myself when I saw a dim reflection of my own pleasure in his eyes.