I rarely went upstairs because the current boyfriend would so often be asleep, having in common with all the others a nocturnal existence of late shifts and even later drinking. But I used to hear the footsteps above, the toilet flush, the worried look on Jenny’s face.
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘We have to be quiet.’
And it was because of this restriction that we seldom played in her room – not that there was much to play with – but she had a hammock that caught my eye, which was suspended above a flattened poster of a calm, blue sea.
‘I look down, rock and dream,’ she said to me proudly. ‘The Lost City of Atlantis is somewhere below me. An adventure waiting for me.’
‘Have you ever seen the sea before?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said, turning away, wiping off a small handprint that had smeared the centre of a mirror.
‘Not even at Southend?’ I said.
‘Tide was out,’ she said.
‘It comes back, you know.’
‘My mum was too bored to wait for it to come back. I could smell it, though. I think I’d like the sea, Elly. Know I would.’
Only once did I see a boyfriend. I’d gone upstairs to use the toilet and, being alone and inquisitive, I crept into Mrs Penny’s room, which was warm and musty with a large mirror at the foot of the bed. I saw his back only. A naked lump of a back that was as uncouth in sleep as it probably was in wakefulness. Even the mirror didn’t reveal his face, it only revealed mine as I stood hypnotised by the wall to my left, where Mrs Penny had written in lipstick ‘I am me’ over and over again, until the multicoloured cursive shapes merged into a tangled mess of expression that hauntingly said, ‘Am I me’.
I was transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home, no matter how strange it appeared to be. This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday: the rows of terraced houses with their rectangular gardens and the routines as reliable as sturdy chairs. This wasn’t the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.
‘There are givers and takers,’ said Mrs Penny as we sat down to sweets and squash. ‘I’m a giver. What are you, Elly?’
‘She’s a giver, Mum,’ said Jenny Penny protectively.
‘Women are givers, men are takers.’ So said the oracle.
‘My dad gives a lot,’ I said. ‘Gives all the time, in fact.’
‘Then he’s a rare bird,’ she said, and quickly changed the subject to something that no one could contradict. When Jenny Penny left the room her mother reached for my hand and asked if I’d ever had my palm read. She was highly skilled at reading palms, she said, tarot cards and tea leaves too. She could read anything; it was her gypsy blood.
‘Books?’ I asked naïvely.
And she blushed and laughed, and her laugh sounded angry.
‘Come on, girls,’ she said as Jenny reappeared. ‘I’ve had enough of your boring games, I’m taking you out.’
‘Where to?’ asked Jenny Penny.
‘Surprise,’ her mother said, in that awful singsong way of hers. ‘You like surprises, don’t you, Elly?’
‘Um,’ I said, not really sure that in her hands I did.
‘Here – coats!’ she said, and threw ours at us as she stormed towards the front door.
She drove badly and erratically, and used her horn as a battering ram to push in and around wherever it was necessary. The dented trailer clattered behind us and swung dangerously around corners, riding up on the pavement, missing pedestrians’ feet by inches.
‘Why don’t we take it off?’ I’d suggested at the start.
‘Can’t,’ she said, revving into first. ‘It’s attached. Soldered on. Where I go, it goes. Like my girl,’ and she laughed loudly.
Jenny Penny looked down at her shoes. I looked down at mine too. I saw a floor cluttered with Coca-Cola cans and tissues and sweet wrappers and something odd that looked like a flaccid balloon.
We saw the church up ahead and, without signalling, turned sharply into the car park. Horns blared. Fists were threatening.
‘Fuck off!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she parked badly behind the hearse: a gaudy expression of life, mocking the transport of the departed. She was asked to move. She did it begrudgingly.
‘House of God,’ she said. ‘What does He care?’
‘He doesn’t,’ said the funeral director. ‘But we can’t get the coffin out.’
We walked into church, Mrs Penny between us, holding our hands, her body bent forwards in an embodiment of sadness. She ushered us into the pew and handed round tissues. Looked up and smiled gently at the truly bereaved. She marked down the corners of the hymn book in preparation for song and threw down the hassock, on which she knelt in prayer. Her actions were fluid and graceful – professional, even? – and from her mouth came a strange whispered reverie, unstoppable even on the intake of breath, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked as if she truly belonged.
As the church slowly filled up, Jenny Penny pulled me towards her and motioned me to follow. We slipped out and crept along the side wall until we came to a heavy wooden door that said: Choir Room. We entered. It was empty and felt airtight. Uncomfortable.
‘Have you done this before?’ I asked. ‘Been to a funeral, I mean?’
‘Once,’ she said, not that interested. ‘Look!’ She wandered over to the piano.
‘Have you seen a dead body before?’
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘In a coffin. The lid was off. They made me kiss it.’
‘Why?’
‘God knows.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Kissing a fridge.’
She pressed a key and a clear mid-range note rang out.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t touch anything,’ I said.
‘It’s all right, no one can hear,’ she said, and pressed the note again. Bing, bing, bing. She closed her eyes. Breathed intently for a moment. Then brought her hands up in front of her chest and blindly laid them on the black and white keys in front.
‘Do you know how to play?’ I whispered.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m trying something,’ and as she pressed down on the notes, I was ambushed by the most beautiful music I’d ever heard. I watched her sway, overcome. The rapture across her brow, the luminescence. I watched her be someone in that moment; free of the shunting, and the making-do, and the calamitous criticism that forged her way and always would. She was whole. And when she opened her eyes, I think she knew it too.
‘Again,’ I said.
‘Don’t think I can,’ she said sadly.
All of a sudden organ music boomed around the church. The music was dulled by the stone walls of the room, but the heavy bass notes reverberated throughout my body, ricocheting against my ribs before barrelling into the cavern that was my pelvis.
‘That’ll be the coffin,’ said Jenny Penny. ‘Come on, let’s have a look, it’s really cool.’ She opened the door and we caught its slow procession as it passed.
We sat on the wall outside and waited. The clouds were quite low, arm’s length from the steeple, falling, falling. We listened to the singing. Two songs, joyous songs, hopeful songs. We knew them but didn’t join in. We kicked our legs and had nothing to say. Jenny Penny reached across and held my hand. Her palm was slippery. I couldn’t look at her. Our guilt and our tears were not for each other. They were for someone else that day.
‘You two are so boring,’ said Mrs Penny, as we sat in the Wimpy Bar, trying to eat lunch.
She looked refreshed and invigorated, with no sign of the morning’s events clinging to her once mournful face. Normally I’d have been ecstatic eating food I rarely ate, but I couldn’t even finish my beefburger or my portion of chips or the tumbler of Coca-Cola that was as big as a boot. My appetite, along with the one for life, had momentarily disappeared.
‘I’m out tonight, Jenpen,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘Gary said he’ll look
after you.’
Jenny Penny looked up and nodded.
‘I’m gonna have fun! Fun! Fun!’ said Mrs Penny as her mouth gorged a quarter of the bun, leaving a smear of lipstick to compete with the ketchup. ‘Bet you girls can’t wait to grow up, eh?’
I looked at Jenny Penny. Looked at the circle of gherkin on the side of my plate. Looked at the wipe-down table. Looked at everything except her.
All through the evening, the visions of the tiny white coffin, not even two feet long, stayed with me. It was bedecked with pink roses and a teddy; carried in protective arms like a newborn. I never told my mother where I’d been that day, nor my father; only my brother learnt of that strange day, the day when I discovered that even babies could die.
Why were we there? Why was Mrs Penny there? Something unnatural held their world together and it was a feeling that, at that age, I couldn’t yet put a word to. My brother said it was probably the braided twine of heartbreak. Of disappointment. Of regret. I was too young to disagree. Or to fully understand.
There had been a bomb blast on a tube train leaving West Ham station. My father had left his meeting early and was on that train when the blast occurred. That’s what he told us during the brief phone call to say he was fine, to say he really was all right and not to worry. And when he walked through the door that Monday evening in March, with flowers for his wife and early Easter eggs for his kids, his suit was still coated with dust and the last tread from the carriage floor. A strange smell hung about his ears – a smell that alternated between burnt matches and singed hair – and a patch of dried blood had pooled at the corner of his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue in shock, and after checking that it was miraculously still intact, he’d calmly picked himself up and wandered silently with the other passengers towards the exit doors and the fresh air beyond.
He laughed and played football in the garden with my brother. He dived to save goals and muddied his knees. He did everything to show us how far away he’d been from death. And it was only when we went to bed and decamped back down to the middle stair, that we heard the house groan, quite literally, with the deflation of his spirit.
‘It’s getting closer,’ he said.
‘Don’t talk such rot,’ said my mother.
‘Last year, and now this. It’s hunting me down.’
The previous September, he’d travelled to the Park Lane Hilton to witness passport forms for an important client, and was about to leave when a bomb tore through the foyer, killing two people and injuring countless others. And had it not been for a desperate last-minute piss he’d needed to take, he too might have been added to the casualty list that mournful week. Instead, a weak bladder had saved his life.
But as the weeks proceeded, instead of accepting that both brushes with death were in fact miracles of survival, my father convinced himself that the vengeful shadow of Justice was looming ever closer. He believed it was simply a matter of time before its jaws would shut and he would find himself a prisoner behind those gated slabs of bloody teeth, realising that all had passed. That life had, in fact, gone.
The football pools rapidly became my father’s lifeline – or obsession – and a win had become so necessary to his existence that some mornings he convinced himself it had happened already. He’d sit at the breakfast table and point to a magazine and say, What house shall we buy today? This one or this one? And I’d look at this deluded man masquerading as my father and quietly reach for the toast. He’d never been bothered by money before and probably wasn’t then, but the winning had become a test of faith. He simply needed proof that he was still a lucky man.
I chose the same numbers every week: my birthday, Jenny Penny’s birthday and Christmas Day – days that were important to me. My brother never went for numbers, rather closed his eyes and allowed his pencil to hover over the grid and to move across the teams like a cup in a séance. He believed he was touched by the god of fortune or some other such notary, and that was what made him different. I said what made him different were ‘those shoes’ he secretly wore at night.
My mother on the other hand, chose anything. ‘Let me have a look,’ she used to say and I would sigh because she didn’t have a method and when she said, ‘Let me have a look,’ I knew she was being random, and such randomness annoyed me; it was like someone carelessly colouring in an orange using only a blue pen. I was convinced that’s why we never won and never would win, but my father still ticked the box that said No publicity, and placed it on the mantelpiece with the exact change to await its midweek collection. And as he did he left with it his pledge: Come Saturday our life will change.
That Saturday we waited for our life to change on the touchline of a rugby pitch, which seemed as good a place to be as any. It happened to be my brother’s first rugby match, this boy whose idea of a contact sport had previously only been conkers, and yet here he was jumping up and down, eagerly awaiting the second half of the match like any normal boy; and normal I wasn’t used to. He’d started secondary school the year before, a private school my father was paying an arm and a leg for (leaving the remaining two for my own education, he’d said) and one in which he’d reinvented himself as someone completely different from the one before. I liked them both, worrying only that the new one, with his new normal interests, might not like me. My feet felt the earth as fragile as eggshells.
A player ran over to my brother and whispered to him. ‘Tactics,’ my father said. My brother nodded and then bent down and rubbed dirt into his hands; I gasped. It was an act so unnatural and queer that I froze in anticipation of the repercussions. And yet once again there were none.
A piercing chill had settled on our side of the pitch, and the listless sun, which had graced us earlier, was now playing hideand-seek behind the tall towers of council flats that dominated the sports field, and left us shivering in shadow. I tried to clap my hands together but I could hardly move. I was wedged into a coat that Mr Harris had bought for me the week before – a totally erroneous purchase that gave benefit to no one except the shop. It was the first time I’d ever worn it, and when I’d finally squeezed into it and gasped at the true horror of its visual impact, there wasn’t enough time to get back out of it and into the car, without one of my parents purposefully breaking my arms to do so.
Mr Harris had seen it in a sale and instead of thinking: would Eleanor Maud like this coat? Would this suit Eleanor Maud? He must have thought: that ugly thing is nearly her size and won’t she look stupid in it? It was white with black arms and a black back, and as tight as a knee support but less useful, and although it was keeping the cold at bay, I felt it was simply because the cold stopped as it approached me and burst into laughter, rather than by any practical means. My parents were too polite (weak) to say I didn’t have to wear it. All they could say was the gesture was kind and better weather would be here soon. I said I could be dead by then.
The whistle blew and the ball was kicked into the air. My brother ran towards it, head high, never taking his eye off it as it descended; watching, instinctively veering around obstacle players, surprisingly fast, and then the jump. He hovered as he gathered the ball and then offset it with a simple flick of his wrists to the man inside. My brother had my mother’s hands: he made that ball talk. I cheered and thought I’d raised my arms in the air but I hadn’t, they were still stiffly by my side; ghost arms of a paralysed person.
‘Come on, the blues,’ shouted my mother.
‘Come on, blues!’ I screamed, making her jump, making her say, ‘Shh.’
My brother raced down the line, ball tucked neatly under his arm. Thirty yards, twenty yards, dummy to his left.
‘Come on, Joe!’ I screamed. ‘Go, Joe! Go, Joe!’
A tap to his ankle, he didn’t fall, no one with him still; fifteen yards and he’s looking around for support, the goal line in sight; and then out of nowhere, rearing from the mud, a five-headed human wall. He hit it at speed, and bone and gristle and teeth collided and bedded down with him into the blood
and mud. Bodies fell on top of him, toppling from both sides until the supporters and the pitch fell silent.
The sun slowly reappeared from behind the tower and illuminated the sculpture of human rubble, under which my brother lay. I looked up at my parents; my mother had turned round unable to watch, her hands shaking, covering her mouth. My father clapped and shouted loudly, ‘Well done, boy! Well done!’ – an unusual response to a possible broken neck. It was obvious I was the only one to sense any danger, and so I dashed onto the pitch. I had only got halfway towards him when someone shouted, ‘P-p-p pick up a Penguin!’
I stopped and looked around. People were laughing at me. Even my parents were laughing at me.