What Are You Like Page 9

  The boys were always twelve, or thereabouts. They never could tell what they had done wrong, though there were lots of re-enactments with the cats in the back kitchen. Annoying the cats was the only crime in this crime-free house, where people were just as good as they could be. Where Rose was expected to sit up straight and get her peas on to the slope of her fork and chat about school, while some cretin chewed with his mouth open and scratched his crotch. Her mother saying ‘Seconds?’ in that chirpy polite voice that made Rose just scream. Nothing they did was bad. Smashing, stealing, spitting – all these she was supposed to Understand. But annoying the cats was a different matter. Teasing the cats, damaging the cats, experimenting on the cats in a scientific fashion, meant just one thing – the social worker putting you in the back of a Fiat with the child lock on and driving you off to the Home. Annoying the cats was Rose’s favourite game, though she never touched them herself It stopped the boys annoying her and it taught the cats a thing or two about the big bad world. It also, if she was lucky, shamed the boys from coming back, as they did come back, for money or a bed, while her parents believed them time after time, and were robbed so often they didn’t bother replacing the telly any more. Rose was the only girl she knew who never saw Top of the Pops.

  Rose locked her bedroom door, opened her drawers and rearranged her things: dolls on the bed, beads in a bowl, the windowsill paved with shells and stones. She sat on the bed and tickled her face with a gonk’s blue hair. The room was so silent – the dolls were dead plastic, the stones were just stones. She wondered what she used to play at, or who she used to talk to, in here.

  Twelve years old. No telly. A sore chest. Outside, the wind sent the leaves of the beech tree slapping against the glass. The more she grew, the more chance Rose had of catching the boys up. She couldn’t tell what might happen when she passed them out.

  She looked at the picture of Adam and Eve that had hung on the wall as long as she could remember. Her long fat stomach, those flabby legs, the weak little hands. Eve was just born. She never had to grow up, never had to be a child, she didn’t have to wait for her first period, or watch her breasts to see if the left one would ever catch up. She just woke up in the garden with her finger stuck in Adam’s belly-button, and was madly in love.

  Above all, she didn’t have parents, like Rose had parents. These people with their old bodies and soft, stupid words. These people who really LOVED you. Rose’s father was a doctor, but that was no use to her – he would say ‘mucal discharge’ as soon as ‘pass the teapot’, she couldn’t invite anyone back. In school, she told people The Facts of Life and no one believed her. When she came home the basement was full of smelly people with their diseases, the back of the house was full of cats. And upstairs, banging his head off the wall or picking his scabs, was The New Boy, waiting for her.

  The secret was to let them stew. Rose would go into the drawing room and play a few simple tunes on the piano, then go humming through the house. After a while she might look in the door of his bedroom, wearing something simple and girlish and very frightening. Or she would leave him until dinnertime, say ‘Hello, you’ as she came into the kitchen, then stoop to feel the thin, light skull of the nearest cat.

  It always worked.

  In the weeks that followed, she would feel him circle her, while she sat, her hands folded in her lap. She sipped her tea, she chattered gaily, she skipped down the drive singing ‘la la la’. And just when he was about to lash out – to pull her hair, or mark her white arms – she would pick up a kitten and say ‘Oh, poor pussy’.

  It always worked, though the waiting was hard. It was hard to sit still with your legs crossed and your mouth curved in a little smile. It was hard not to speak. While she waited, Rose told herself stories. She was the child of a ballet dancer, she was the child of a spy, on the run. But she knew there was no need to explain herself to them. That was what the waiting was for.

  Rose came in from school with her gym bag over her shoulder and checked the hallstand. An anorak, dirty blue, with quilted orange lining. She decided to go out into the back garden and play on the swing. Rose hated the swing. She was too old for the swing. But her mother had trained a clematis down the sides of the chain and it was in flower, so she went out to play on the swing.

  After a while, she ran back into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She took a straw and sipped while she walked through the garden, swaying slightly from side to side, bored, bored as hell.

  She ignored the face at the window, a white shadow behind the black pane. She emptied half the orange juice into a flowerbed and skipped back into the house, so bored she could die.

  After piano practice, she changed into a pale yellow cotton frock with a white yoke and patent leather shoes. She was twelve. She could vomit. She didn’t know why she did this any more.

  When she came down to dinner, he was sitting there, eating like a maniac. He glanced up at her, then went back to the food on his plate.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She didn’t expect a reply.

  Her father walked in and squeezed the back of her neck.

  ‘Squeeze,’ he said.

  ‘Squeak!’ she said back. He settled The Lancet beside his plate and picked up a spoon.

  ‘I think you’re pregnant,’ said her mother to a fat grey Persian. ‘I think you’ve slipped through the net.’

  The boy finished his meal before anyone else and pushed back his plate.

  ‘That was lovely, Mrs Cotter. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Mother!’ said Rose. ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let the tissue go,’ said Rose. ‘Just let it go. You’ve been waving that tissue for the last half-hour. You’ve been eating with it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said her mother, looking at a scrap of tissue she had clutched to her left palm.

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ said Rose.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said her father.

  ‘Do you know where that’s been?’ she said.

  And so it went. On day two, he asked her mother what the food was.

  ‘Ratatouille, dear,’ and Rose swallowed a smile. She decided to wind him a little tighter.

  ‘Daddy, what’s a hermaphrodite?’ And azzakazhaam, there he was, spilling salt on to the table, drawing a diagram with his index finger.

  The problem was getting the little bugger on his own. Usually the boys hung around after dinner as if they expected a telly to materialise somewhere – out of one of the cupboards maybe, or from behind one of the chairs – but this one just set his chair back flush to the table and went up to his room. Rose finished the dishes and hstened to the silence. She decided to have a big long soak with her 4711 bath salts. When she passed his open door on the landing, he said something foreign.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s Czech.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘As in, Czechoslovakia.’ He was sitting at a little desk over by the window that was too small for him. His face looked peaky in the yellow lamplight and his eyes were blank and grey.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Fun!’

  The next evening he looked into one face, then the other, as they ate, then cleared his throat and started to speak. He asked her mother why her forehead was so smooth and pale at the top, when the rest of her face wasn’t.

  ‘Africa, dear. I always wore a hat.’ Her father looked up.

  ‘Ultraviolet,’ he said, and Rose despaired.

  By the end of the meal, they had been through Nigeria and Sierra Leone. They had talked about Yoruba and Ibo, and the Leopard Claw Murders of bloody Calabar.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said her father. ‘Yes, I do. Yes, I do miss it,’ and Rose was amazed. He had never said as much to her.

  ‘Of course it had fallen apart by then. It’s all a question of when you leave.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘I can appreciate that.’

  When she went upstairs he was
sitting just under the first landing with his legs propped up on the wall. Rose turned around, like it was a game, and came back with a young calico cat that jerked its back into every stroke of your hand. She sat on a step below him, setting the cat between them.

  ‘Randy little bugger,’ she said.

  He said some more of his Czech words. They made his tongue sound soft and thick and muscular. Rose kept pulling the cat’s tail.

  ‘What’s that mark on your arm?’ she said.

  ‘My uncle tied me to the radiator.’

  ‘Didn’t know they had radiators in Czechoslovakia,’ said Rose, despite herself.

  ‘Well, now you do.’ He picked the cat up and placed it on his leg. He straightened his knee, lifting it into the air, and made a creaking sound.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Isambard Kingdom Brunel?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Clifton suspension bridge. Six-hundred-and-thirty-foot span.’

  The cat jumped and ran.

  Her parents came up the stairs and stepped over each of them in turn. They let the dark fall and told time by the hands of his fluorescent watch. It was hard to tell what they talked about by the first landing in the dark: Radioactivity, Time, Cats.

  He said that, in his head, the alphabet was all colours. D was pink, O was white with a sort of halo of blue. No matter what words the letters came in, the colours never changed. He said it was genetic. He showed her a roll of money and Rose did not ask where he had got it from. He said his grandfather was a White Russian. He said his grandmother was a Jew.

  At four in the morning they dropped out of the bathroom window, on to the garage, then climbed on to the roof proper and sat there until the light broke. The tiles fell black and steep to either side of the house. If you squinched up your eyes, you could see the back garden and the front garden, both at the same time.

  The morning came, grey and faintly pulsing. Rose saw their street change into a coloured map of the street – greeny, leafy, Bellingham Close, Leatherhead, Surrey.

  They climbed down at six, their legs trembling. Inside, the house was huge and hilarious. It took them ages to get up the stairs. Rose fell asleep like she was taking off a runway. She dreamt of a story written in a secret language, whose colours changed even as you looked at it.

  On Saturday they got into the Volvo and sat on opposite ends of the back seat. When they arrived at the shopping centre Rose realised her mother was wearing old plimsolls under her floral skirt.

  ‘See you in half an hour,’ she said.

  They stole some dried apricots from a bin in the Health Food shop, then ran across the car park, making faces and throwing the lot away, like scattering money.

  Inside the supermarket, they walked the two cross aisles, hiding and finding each other from Soap Powders to Paperware to Pet Foods. Rose started to laugh. Then she saw her mother by the delicatessen, getting free samples and talking loudly to the man behind the counter.

  The boy nudged her, showed her a packet of Jaffa Cakes hidden under his anorak.

  ‘We’ve got those at home,’ said Rose. They followed her mother secretly through the shop and up to the till. She unloaded the trolley, squeezing and feeling each item of food as she placed it on the conveyor belt. But her face looked so thoughtful that Rose nearly forgave her the stupid shoes.

  Back home, there was a woman sitting on the doorstep, in a shapeless camel coat and a dust-pink headscarf. She had a plastic bag gathered beside her on the step and a cigarette in her hand.

  Her mother went up to the door while Rose stood beside the car and looked up at her beech tree for a while, the bonnet ticking beside her. When she looked around, he was still in the back seat so she opened the door and pulled him out low on to the ground.

  ‘Tony,’ said the woman, when she saw him. ‘Tony!’ He walked towards her. When he was close enough, she reached for the back of his neck and pulled him down and kissed him. He stood back and pushed his hand through his hair. She reached into the plastic bag and took out a book. It was called The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  The woman started crying. Her mother brought her into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and Rose went into the front room to practise the piano. Between pieces, she listened while the boy stood in the hall – her mother opening the kitchen door and whispering, while the woman said, ‘Tony. Please. Tony,’ over and over again.

  Finally, her father came home and got the creature out of the house.

  As soon as the door closed, she went bananas. She walked up and down the path, shouting at the street. Rose watched from the front window as she wrote with her lipstick along the top of the wall. When the lipstick broke, she threw the stub at the window and cracked it.

  Rose’s father disappeared into the surgery, then he went out to her with a pill and a glass of water. Her father was so tall. He had a really gentle body and he had to stoop over her to offer the glass. The woman looked at him. She steadied herself against the wall for a moment. Then she walked away.

  After dinner the boy came into the front room and sat on the floor. He leant his back against the armchair Rose sat in, and stayed there until the moment for speaking had passed.

  The ebony men and soapstone men were arranged on the sideboard where the television used to be, before it was stolen one last time. Rose liked their long slim lines and the smooth oval holes, like handles for picking them up.

  Upstairs her parents slept. Her father twitching at mosquitoes in his sleep, mending black people, sewing them up. His own flesh like wax that, when you cut it, did not bleed.

  ‘Thought your name was “Anton”,’ she said, finally.

  ‘That wasn’t my mother,’ he said.

  Rose sighed and closed her book.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Just.’

  Rose slid down from her chair and sat beside him. She took his arm in both of hers and hugged it.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said. He rolled her on to the ground and straddled her. She punched him in the stomach and he fell over on to her, still crouched, his arms on either side of her head. He rested his forehead on the floor and started to make a noise.

  Rose pushed the fleshy side of her hand against his mouth, to hush him. She put her fingers against his chin, and his mouth followed her hand into the air. He was eating at her fingers, she could feel his spit slide down the sides.

  This was not how it was supposed to be. His legs were on top of her now. One of his hips pushed and ground into her stomach. Rose realised she had been imagining something like this all along, but something different. She tried to remember what it was, as she pulled her hand away and stroked his sides, trying to calm him down. There was a muscle like a turned rope that wound down to his waist. His face was moving against her neck, still making the noise. Rose could not shape her lips to say ‘shush’, her mouth would not close. She realised she was going to cry and, as her body gathered for tears, he stopped.

  ‘Shush,’ she said. He looked at her, surprised. His mouth came down again, quietly, and pulled at her bottom lip, his heavy skull swinging down to the floor.

  Rose kissed him. And under the high round of her pubic bone, a pain started to spread. It rose like dough, clinging and tearing from the bowl of her pelvis. Then the pain shot down like a needle and she pressed it against the leg of his jeans. She moved it against him but he rolled away from her, leaving her body open to the air. He stood up.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. And paused. And left the room.

  They ignored each other for a week.

  Her mother took out a pack of cards on Friday night to cheer everyone up. Rose hated cards, the sight of her father with a Jack of Spades stuck to his forehead was just excruciating. But the boy played quietly and after a while she was shouting at him and trying to sneak a look at his hand.

  The next morning she decided to cut his hair. She wasn’t very good at it, and started to laugh at his face in the mirror,

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ he said.


  ‘It’s a Czech haircut,’ she said. ‘It’s all the rage in Bratislava.’

  Then he was on top of her again, wrestling her to the floor,

  ‘“Anton”,’ she said. ‘Oh, “Anton”.’

  His knees dug into the dip at the top of her arm where the tendon met the bone. He was light and tough. She could see up the sleeve of his T-shirt, to the hollow under his arm. She stared into his eyes and he picked up a handful of the cut hair.

  She kicked up, lifting him off the ground, while he rode bronco, with his hand held high. When they dropped back down, the air was smashed out of her chest. She rolled her head from side to side, trying to bite through the denim of his jeans. When she lunged at his crotch, he got some of the hair into her open mouth. She tried to spit and he stuffed in more, so she clenched her teeth and looked him in the eye.

  Her throat was full of hair. She started to dry retch and her eyes filled with tears.

  They stayed like that for a long time. She hawked, tried to push the dry stuff forward with her tongue. She kneed him in the back and when he lost balance, she spat, then scraped her tongue along the seam of his jeans. They looked at each other for a while.

  He caught her chin with his hand and tried to squeeze her jaw open. When he pushed a finger between her teeth, she bit down hard. She thought he might hit her then but he just leaned back, folded his arms and started to whistle.

  Rose didn’t care. She could stay like this for ever. She knew she would win. He could kill her if he wanted to – she would die winning.

  Then her mother came up the stairs saying ‘Anyone for a swim after Mass?’ and he swung off her and walked out on to the landing.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said her mother. ‘Never mind.’

  Rose floated up from the bottom of the pool, face first. She lay there a second, then swam underwater over to where he was hanging on to the rail. Of course he wouldn’t go out of his depth; he just splashed around a lot, making noise. She thought about pulling his underpants down but dunked him instead. When she wrapped her legs around his neck, she could feel his hands grab and slip from her back. He punched her crotch and the pain was remarkable. The lifeguard yanked them from the pool, still joined together. His head bounced on her stomach, then clunked on the tiles.