Everything happened that day in stages which didn’t quite follow on from what had gone before. They were like reels from different films. I wondered idly if Bhagavan had ever used that analogy. Or they were like different versions of the same scene, not properly edited for continuity.
At some stage Audrey came back from a friend’s birthday party. A twelfth birthday, I expect. We heard her being dropped off in the drive, saying her goodbyes and thank-yous as nicely as Mum could wish. As she let herself in, Mum and Dad greeted her with ‘Nice party, dear?’ Anyone could tell that they weren’t really interested, they were only marking time. They were waiting for her to go to her room, so that they could carry on whatever business was being transacted where I was.
Reels that don’t match
Audrey didn’t go to her room just yet. She went into the kitchen, and then she came to have a little chat with me. Meanwhile Mum and Dad busied themselves nonsensically. Mum started picking up magazines and putting them away in the rack where they lived. The moment she had finished, Dad started searching through it, as if suddenly he couldn’t live without reading a particular article. Mum made one of her many noises of exasperation and went over to fiddle with the telephone. It vexed her that the cord was always getting snarled up — she thought that Dad gave the receiver a half-turn when he answered the phone, and another half-turn in the same direction when he returned it to its cradle. She blamed him for charging the cord with kinks, even if she could never catch him at it. She knew full well that at her mother’s house the flex wouldn’t dare to stray from its spiral.
I roused myself a little and agreed to participate in the illusion of time, out of politeness to Audrey, but strictly on a trial basis. She was wearing a purple party dress, and had been allowed to put on nail polish. Her movements were smooth and assured. Quite a little pile of books, placed on her head, would have stayed there safely in balance.
I hardly recognised her. I had missed a few stages. Of course I hadn’t been paying much attention, to her or to anyone else at that address. In any case girls between about eleven and sixteen always resemble films like the one I seemed to be in, made up of reels that don’t match. The genre switches from fairy tale to love story, and sometimes to horror movie. A world of princes and ponies can suddenly be filled with screaming banshees.
I remembered that in the past she had hated party games, and asked if there had been any.
‘A few specially horrible ones,’ she said over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen.
‘None that involved kissing, I hope?’ She made an odd stylised sound, which I took a few seconds to understand without benefit of visual clues. I imagine she was miming a retch, with or without the embellishment of a finger pointing down her throat, though the whole display was as far removed from what it represented, human emesis, as something in classical Japanese drama.
Actually she sounded less disgusted than she would have done the previous year. She was going through the motions a little bit. It wouldn’t be all that long before the kissing games were the only ones that interested her. I imagined she would play them as ruthlessly as she did all the others.
‘Sally’s mum made her invite all the boys from our class,’ she said, ‘but only three of them came.’ I could hear the clatter of a plate. ‘The really pathetic ones.’
Audrey was reading from her own little script while Mum and Dad took a reluctant break from their interrogation of me. The noises from the kitchen continued as she went about some mysterious domestic business. There was the sound of her pushing a chair against the kitchen counter so she could reach something from a high cupboard. Then I heard a familiar scrape as she pulled a particular tray out from beside the fridge, where it lived.
When she came into the sitting room, she was carrying a tray of treats for me. She had taken her party trophy, a slice of chocolate cake, and cut it into cubes, pushing a cocktail stick into each cube. It must have been the little box of cocktail sticks which was kept in the high cupbard. She set down the tray in front of me, where it rested snugly across the side-pieces of the wheelchair. All this was done with the grace of a hostess rather than the conflicted sweetness of a sister. She was growing up.
She was playing a part, of course, but so were Mum and Dad, and at the moment I preferred Audrey’s.
As she came out of the kitchen with her tray of cubed cake, I saw her in a new light, despite the Mayan darkness of that afternoon. As she moved through the sitting room to the wheelchair, threading her way through the distortions of family life in her party dress, bearing her tray of John-adapted cake, I began to think for the first time that perhaps she had known, better than any of us, what she was doing when she chose the womb. Perhaps she would pick her way through everything that was wrong and out of kilter with the family. The gala purple nail-polish lent her gestures a self-conscious overtone — a finishing-school or ladies’-academy touch. She looked like the serene housewife in a television advert serving canapés to her guests. Her hands were going before her into adulthood. They were leading the way. Their movements were taking on the sophistication of things practised in front of the mirror, time after time, until they were effortless.
She gave me a smile which changed in mid-flight, becoming gravely enchanting, an expression with two distinct phases like a two-stage rocket — as if an air hostess had suddenly thought of Grace Kelly. She was growing up more or less as I watched.
My mouth was dry. My lips were sticky as I tried to mumble the chunks of cake. Audrey fetched me a glass of water and then, great refinement of refreshment, a damp flannel. She wiped my mouth with it.
Lemon juice in her eye
I don’t mean to idealise Audrey’s performance too much. She knew perfectly well that Mum didn’t want her around, though she can’t have had much clue about the interrogation that was taking place (I certainly didn’t). Audrey was giving comfort to the accused in a way that was guaranteed to cause irritation.
Mum said, ‘Audrey, your room is like a pigsty. You promised me you’d tidy it up the moment you got in from your party, remember? Now’s the time.’ Audrey said, ‘Yes, Mum,’ very demurely, but she gave me a wink. I think it was a wink — she hadn’t quite got the knack as yet, not quite in control of the facial machinery, so it was a rather wild spasm and she looked as if she’d got some lemon juice in her eye.
My habit was to hoard my various tablets in term-time so I had plenty when I went home. Alertness seemed a waste of time at that address. To be compos mentis was a mug’s game, or so I thought, and exposes you to all sorts of nonsense. Well, yes, but the same is true of a medicated doze.
Audrey went upstairs to her room at last. She put a record on the record-player and played it eleven times in a row. It was David Bowie’s maddeningly catchy and childlike ‘Starman’. She was playing it louder than she was allowed, but I fancy she had a canny sense of the disruption in the household, and what it enabled her to get away with.
Or she may simply have been trying to blot us all out, or even sending a message to the starman in the song, who was supposed to be waiting in the sky after all, to say that she needed immediate rescue. The last record she had played so many times on the trot had been ‘When You Wish upon a Star’. Or perhaps ‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ I see now that the star theme was a constant.
The interrogation began again. The bust-up of summer 1972 was about what all proper family rows are about — sex and drugs. In that respect it was exemplary. And still Mum and Dad got completely the wrong end of the stick. They could have got the wrong end of a marble. They were going by what they had found in my Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, with its discreet embroidered lambda, hanging invitingly from the handles of the wheelchair, not what they would have learned if they’d talked to me.