Whistling for the Elephants (3 page)

‘Indian
name.’ I leaned forward to hear as Father whispered to me on the back seat.
Mother slept bolt upright in the front, seeing nothing. ‘Sassaspaneck. They say
it’s Algonquin for “Where the fresh fish meets the salt”. Been reading up on
the history. Fascinating bit of colonial stuff’ If Father had a passion for
anything it was for history. He liked anything which had already happened. Where
you knew the end of the story. He was not given to fiction. ‘Place used to be
packed with Algonquin. Tricky fellows. Europeans had a terrible time. No crops,
smallpox, and no one could calm the Indians down. Then the British sent in
General Amherst. Jeffrey Amherst. Tremendous chap.’

We
crossed over the Amherst River which ran down into Sassaspaneck Sound.
Congregational and Methodist churches, so white that they had to have been
touched by God himself, dominated the street corners. Past Tony’s Pizzeria and
the Dairy Queen, and then we turned down into the residential area. I couldn’t
imagine the Indians living here at all. Clapboard houses with porches needing
paintwork and swing seats that had lost their swing stood shielded behind acres
of ripped flyscreening. Everything looked big and expansive to our English eyes
but I guess even then the town must have begun to feel a little down-at-heel.
It was ex-grandeur rather than grandeur.

‘Know
what he did? Amherst? Gave all the natives blankets from the smallpox hospital.
I think it must be the earliest example of modern germ warfare. Tremendous.
They all died of smallpox and the settlers used the Indian stores to survive
the winter.’

It was
what the town was famous for. The spreading of smallpox. The killing of
Indians.

‘Here
we are.’

The
house was right on the waterfront. 5 Cherry Blossom Gardens was in what the
Americans call a dead end. The French call it a ‘cul de sac’, which sounds
slightly exclusive. The English call it a ‘close’, which breathes their horror
of proximity, but it was a dead end. A dead end of five houses. Four of them
were rather large, with one lawn running casually into the next. Ours was the
smallest and the only one with a holly hedge at the front. I think that’s why
Father chose it. I’m sure he could never have hired a house without boundaries.
The house itself was a large bungalow covered in light green clapboard which on
closer inspection turned out to be made of aluminium. (It would take me a while
to learn it was a ranch-style house, not a bungalow, and it was made of aluminum,
not aluminium.) The clang of halyards against masts rang out across the water. A
real house. I couldn’t believe it. It was wonderful. Mother got out of the car
and stood in the driveway looking at the new place. Father didn’t look at her.
He busied himself with the luggage. Mother never travelled light. He would be
busy for some time. I took my own bag and headed for the front door.

‘What
the hell is this?’ Mother didn’t yell. She didn’t even raise her voice but it
was enough to stop us porters in our tracks. We looked at her. Standing in the
driveway at Cherry Blossom Gardens, her expensive coat flung casually across
her cashmere shoulders, Mother was patently entirely out of place. The Empress
of Russia come to rest in some peasant quarter.

‘You
need somewhere quiet,’ whispered Father. ‘You’ve not been … yourself lately
… have you? I thought by the water…’

‘Charles,
I am not living here. People with smallpox wouldn’t live here.’ She had been
listening.

Father
looked at me, his neck surging around his collar looking for air.

‘We
need to tighten our belts a little. It will be fun, won’t it, Dorothy?’

I think
I was supposed to help him but I wasn’t sure how. I nodded, trying to imagine
us having fun.

‘I am
not living here,’ said Mother, raising her chin but not her voice.

Father
addressed a large hatbox firmly. ‘I spent the money on your tickets. This is
what there is.

It had
been quite close to a row and everyone felt most uncomfortable. I didn’t know
about money then. We had always had it and I had never thought about it. If not
having money meant living in a real house then I thought it was great. Father
opened the door and began staggering in with luggage. I dumped my bag and
wandered around. The lounge was at the heart of the house. A vast room with
plate-glass windows on to a flyscreened porch overlooking Sassaspaneck Harbour.
Dense flyscreening protected all the large windows and made the view of the bright
harbour endlessly grey. Off the sitting room were the dining room and the
kitchen. The kitchen was absurd: thirty feet of fitted shininess which Mother
would never set foot in. It had the most enormous fridge I had ever seen.
Taller than me with a great silver lever of a handle, it bulged as if it had
already overeaten. The other side of the lounge was a large bedroom for Father
and Mother, again facing the harbour, a small bedroom for me and a third room
for Father’s study. The furniture was all ‘early American’ — a heavy,
semi-quilted look straight from a catalogue. There was nothing about the house
which suggested that it was ours but I loved it. I wandered from room to room,
trying to soak it all in and ignore the strong smell of mothballs. When he had
finished with the bags, Father went and stood by the front door. He held the
screen open until Mother had no choice but to come in. She stood in the lounge
looking down at everything. Father got her a drink of water.

‘Have
one of your pills,’ he said quietly, getting them from her bag. Mother took it
and handed him back the glass without looking. Each word she spoke came out
like a telegram.

‘We are
not staying here. I won’t. I can’t. You know how I get all … et cetera.’

‘I’ll
see what I can do,’ he soothed. He always soothed her in the end. Mother went
to lie down. Which was probably just as well. Father had just helped her into
the bedroom and was looking out to the boats with me. We were trying to think
of something to say. I thought maybe I should ask what had happened and why we
were here but I couldn’t think where to begin. Anyway, I liked it. I didn’t
want to not stay. That was when the front screen door banged open and a woman
with skyscraper hair appeared.

She was
the most carefully constructed woman I had ever seen in my life. Everything
about her was carefully polished and planned but it didn’t quite work like
Mother. It was a much cheaper imitation. A market-stall run-up of a Gucci bag.
A whole beauty shop of smells enveloped me as I stood, gawky and unsure in the
face of such blatant womanhood. Mother often complained about women who ‘hadn’t
made the most of themselves’. This woman had made the most of herself some time
ago and then just carried on, not knowing when to stop. Nothing, not a hair was
out of place. She wore very tight trousers. Black pedal pushers in spray-on
form. I had never seen my mother in trousers. Indeed I don’t think at that time
I even had a pair myself. Her fluffy white sweater finished rather too early
around her midriff and her high heels stopped rather too late. She wasn’t
young. I guess she must have been as much as forty but she carried her youth
preserved in pancake and powder.

In her
arms she carried a very elderly white poodle, a hatbox of a cake and a large
black bag. The poodle too had been manicured to within an inch of its diamanté
collar. It looked down its nose at me as water ran from its slightly yellow,
rheumy eyes.

‘Hey,
honey. Judith Schlick. You have gotta be Dorothy. Ain’t you cute? What do they
call you?’

‘Dorothy,’
I said.

Mrs Schlick
raised a pencil-line eyebrow. ‘Well, I never. Is your father home?’ She swept
in, moving towards Father in a spectacular series of curves as if avoiding
unseen sharp objects. ‘Charlie, so they came. Finally. How fabulous. A little
cake. What else could I do? Think of it as a kind of Welcome Wagon.’

‘Mrs Schlick…’
The dog wrestled its way to the floor and Father had no choice but to take the
violent cake. I had never seen an American layer cake before. It was
incredible. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. For a start it was green. And not
just any green. Mesmerizing green. A sort of poor-man’s-St-Patrick’s-Day
celebration green. A green you couldn’t imagine anybody coming up with for
anything, let alone a cake. The bright green icing was raised up all over in
sharp little spikes which spat from its sides. At least a foot and a half in
diameter, the cake gave rather more the impression of having landed than having
been baked. It was an alien thing.

‘Charlie,
Charlie! Mrs Schlick! Really, you English and your manners. Judith, remember?
He is
sooo
polite, your father, such a gentleman.’ Mrs Schlick settled
carefully on the settee like a rather rare butterfly come to rest, and crossed
her legs. ‘Charlie and I have had such nice talks, haven’t we, Charlie?’

This
was impossible to imagine. Her right foot swung rhythmically in the air.
Perfect pink polished toenails peeked out from her mesmerizingly tall sandal. I
took a sharp breath. She had an ankle chain! I gawped. I know I did. Mother had
talked about women like this. Women who were genuine floozies. Women who didn’t
use doorbells. Women who wore ankle chains.

‘Rocco,
you dirty devil. Stop that.’ She began to giggle. The elderly poodle was
standing on its hind paws and had firmly attached itself to Father’s leg. It
had a slightly strange grin as it humped hell out of his highly polished
brogues. Sex had entered our house. Father’s neck twitched uncontrollably
against his collar but he did not move.

‘And
your wife?’ Mrs Schlick scanned the room with rapid radar.

‘Sleeping,
the trip, you know, et cetera,’ he whispered.

‘Of
course, of course.’ Every word sprang straight from her nose.

When
Mrs Schlick and Rocco finally left, Father was still standing in the middle of
the sitting room, with a stain on his trousers, holding the green cake.

‘She
lives across the road,’ he whispered, his neck going double speed. I felt I
ought to say something.

‘Father?’

‘Yes?’
he mouthed.

‘What
flavour is green?’

‘I don’t
know.’

We
stood and looked at each other for a moment. He never mentioned my hair. I went
outside.

A group
of children were playing in the street. I didn’t know what they were playing.
It involved a rugger ball and a lot of shouting. They stopped when they saw me.
No one said anything. There were about six of them and they circled warily
towards me. One of them, a girl, older and bigger than me, picked up a bottle
of squash or pop or something from the edge of the road. She thrust it towards
me.

‘Hey
you, you wanna soda?’ I wasn’t sure that I did, any more than I wanted green
cake, but they were all watching so I carefully put the drink to my lips and
sipped. The place erupted, the children screaming and jumping about.

‘Cooties!
Cooties!’ They pointed and jabbed at me.

‘Urgh,
you got cooties!’

There
was no two ways about it. I had got cooties and I didn’t know what they were. I
did know one thing. I did not have the language for this place. Not yet,
anyway.

Chapter
Two

America. Land of therapy. Where
something or someone is always to blame. They say the Americans have such a
restless frontier ethos that when they got to California and couldn’t go any
further they carried on exploring inside themselves. It hadn’t reached a
national obsession yet in ‘68. The country was only just beginning to put
itself on the couch. No one knew that pets could have ‘abandonment issues’,
that cheese was a dangerous foodstuff or that America could lose the Vietnam
War. The US had not yet adopted for itself the onerous role of the world’s
policeman, but the foundations of the place were beginning to shake a little.
Martin Luther King was dead a month and it pricked the conscience of people who
had thought he was nothing to do with them.

Although
there were only a few weeks to the endless American summer holidays, Father
registered me in the sixth grade of Amherst Elementary School. The school was
big with hundreds of students and there was a lot to learn. Not so much in the
lessons as in the structure of the place. Even Adam and Eve knew that, if you
want a little control, first you have to learn to name everything. Lesson one —
everyone had a ‘homeroom’. This was where you belonged. Your sorority as it
were. You might spend part of each day elsewhere but your homeroom and, more
specifically, your homeroom teacher, was base. Outside the homeroom you had a
long, thin, metal locker with a combination lock. In this you kept everything
of value and your lunch. My locker was number 69. I was the last to join class
6A and locker 69 had been empty all year. I didn’t know but it had belonged to
a girl who, at the age of eleven, had been kicked out of school for ‘going down’
on the assistant football coach. There was a general sense that her unnatural
precocity was catching and no one had wanted her locker with its sniggering number.
I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know sixty-nine was a funny number. I
thought going down was something you did in a lift. I didn’t know why everyone
whispered when I approached my locker down the long, dark corridor. I was
blinkered. I just liked having a locker with a lock. I thought it was a secret
place for secret things.