Adam And Eve And Pinch Me Read online

  Losing Jock had been a bad shock, especially coming less than a year after she lost Auntie. She hadn’t been the same since, though she couldn’t exactly have said how she’d been different. Something inside her head seemed to have lost its balance. He’d have said, but said it in a nice way, “You never were all that balanced, Polo,” and maybe he was right.

  She’d never get married now. Still, she had her house and work, and nice neighbors. Maybe she’d get over him one day the way she was getting over Auntie. She’d slept all right, the deep, dreamless sleep of someone whose dreams all come in her waking hours. The bath was filling with water as hot as she could stand it. Never leave a bath to run on its own, was Auntie’s advice. Her sister Edna, the one who saw ghosts, had done that; she’d gone down to answer the door and when she’d taken in the post and a parcel she turned round to see water dripping through the ceiling. Auntie had a lot of tales to tell of her sister Edna and her sister Kathleen, especially the things they did when they were young. Sometimes her voices were their voices and sometimes they were God and the duke of Windsor.

  The water was hot and clear, unpolluted by bath essence. She lay back and dipped her head under, shampooed her hair first, soaped her body vigorously. Jock said she was too thin, needed to get some flesh on her bones, but it was natural, there was nothing to be done about it. It didn’t matter now that she wasn’t well covered. She rinsed her hair, kneeling up and putting her head under the running tap. It could dry naturally. She didn’t like hair-dryers, blowing dusty air all over your head, not even the one he’d bought her that claimed to purify the air it puffed out. Her teeth well brushed, she rinsed mouthwash over her palate, under her tongue, round the back molars. Deodorant, clean underwear, clean cotton trousers and long-sleeved T-shirt. In the local Asda they called the ones they sold antiperspirants, a name Minty didn’t like at all; it made her shudder to think of perspiration.

  Breakfast was toast and Marmite, clean and dry. A cup of tea with plenty of milk and sugar. Minty put two bath towels, two hand towels, two sets of underwear, two pairs of trousers, two T-shirts, and the coat lining into the washing machine, set and started it. She’d come back at lunchtime and put it in the dryer, and maybe make time to visit Auntie’s grave. The morning was gray, misty, still. There was a queue for the 18 bus so she walked to the dry cleaners past Fifth and Sixth Avenues, stepping over the cracks. Minty had grown up with street names like that and couldn’t see anything funny about it but it had made Jock laugh. He’d only been in the area a few months and every time he saw the name he’d cast up his eyes, laugh that soundless laugh of his, and say, “Fifth Avenue! I don’t believe it.”

  Admitted, it wasn’t a very nice part, but “run-down” and “a real slum,” which were what Jock called it, were going a bit far. OTT, to use his own expression. To Minty it appeared gray and dreary but familiar, the background of her life for nearly thirty-eight years, for she’d been a baby when Agnes left her with Auntie “for an hour at the maximum” and never came back. The row of shops ran from Second to First Avenue on Harrow Road. Two of them had closed and been boarded up or they’d have been vandalized. The Balti takeaway was still there, a bathroom fittings shop, a builder’s merchant, a unisex hairdresser, and, on the corner, Immacue. It was just as well Minty had brought her key, for Josephine wasn’t there yet.

  She let herself in, put up the blind on the door, slid back the bars on the window. Some very strange people roamed Harrow Road by night. Nothing was safe. Minty stood still a moment, breathing in Immacue’s smell, a mixture of soap, detergent, clean linen, dry-cleaning fluids, and stain remover. She’d have liked 39 Syringa Road to smell like that, but she simply hadn’t the wherewithal. It was a scent that developed over years of cleansing within a relatively small space. And inhaling it was the reverse of what Minty sometimes experienced when it was her lot to sort through the piles of clothes customers brought in and, as they were moved and lifted and turned over, there rose from them a nasty odor of stale sweat and food stains.

  Exactly nine-thirty. She turned the sign on the inside of the door to OPEN and went into the back room, where the ironing awaited her. Immacue provided a shirt service and it was her job on weekdays, and Saturdays too, to iron fifty shirts before lunchtime. It was mostly women who brought them in and collected them, and Minty sometimes wondered who wore them. Most people were poor around here, single mothers and pensioners and out-of-work boys looking for trouble. But a lot of yuppies who worked in the city had bought houses nearby; they were cheap by present-day standards and near the West End, even if they were the kind of places their parents wouldn’t have looked at twice. They must be the men who wore these snowy white and pink and blue-striped shirts to go to their jobs in offices and banks, these two hundred immaculate shirts encased in cellophane and with a neat little cardboard collar and cardboard bow tie fixed to each one.

  By the time Josephine came in Minty had ironed five. Always when she arrived in the morning she went up to Minty and gave her a kiss. Minty submitted to this salutation, even lifted up her cheek for it, but she didn’t much care for being kissed by Josephine, who wore thick, waxy, dark red lipstick, some of which inevitably came off on Minty’s clean, pale skin. After she’d gone to hang up her coat Minty went to the sink and washed her cheek and then she washed her hands. Fortunately, there were always plenty of cleaning materials, cloths, sponges, and brushes at Immacue.

  Customers started coming in, but Josephine attended to them. Minty wouldn’t go out there unless one of them asked for her specially or Josephine called her. There were still some who didn’t know what had happened to Jock and who asked how her fiancé was or when was she getting married, and Minty had to say, “He got killed in the Paddington train crash.” She didn’t like having sympathy; it embarrassed her, especially now she’d seen his ghost last night. Saying he was dead and accepting the kind things they said seemed like cheating somehow.

  They had coffee at eleven. Minty drank hers and washed her hands. Josephine said, “How’re you feeling, love? D’you reckon you’re starting to get over it?”

  Minty wondered if she should tell about the ghost but decided against it. A woman customer had once said she’d seen her mother in a dream and in the morning got a phone call to say she was dead. She’d died at the precise time of the dream. Josephine had said, quite rudely, “You can’t be serious,” and laughed a scornful laugh. So better say nothing about it.

  “Life has to go on, doesn’t it?” she said.

  Josephine agreed. “You’re right, it’s no good dwelling on things.” A big, full-breasted woman with long legs, she had bright blond hair as long as an eighteen-year-old girl’s, but a kind heart. Or so everyone said. Minty lived in fear that a flake of the dark red varnish she wore on her fingernails would chip off and fall in the coffee. Josephine had a Chinese boyfriend who couldn’t speak a word of English and was a cook in a restaurant in Harlesden called the Lotus Dragon. They’d both met Jock when he picked her up after work.

  “He was a lovely chap,” said Josephine. “Life’s a bitch, when you come to think of it.”

  Minty would rather not have talked about it, especially now. She finished the fiftieth shirt at ten to one and went home for an hour. Lunch was free-range eggs scrambled on white toast. She washed her hands before eating and again afterward, and her face as well, and put the washing in the dryer. The flower-selling man had set up his stall outside the cemetery gates. It wasn’t really spring yet, it was still February, but he’d got daffodils and tulips as well as the chrysanthemums and carnations that had been around all winter. Minty had filled an empty bleach bottle with water and brought it with her. She bought six pink tulips and six white narcissi with orange centers.

  “In remembrance of your auntie, is it, love?”

  Minty said it was and it was nice to see the spring flowers.

  “You’re right there,” said the flower-selling man, “and what I say is, it does your heart good to see a bit of a kid like your
self remembering the old folks. There’s too much indifference in the world these days.”

  Thirty-seven isn’t a “bit of a kid” but a lot of people thought Minty much younger than she was. They didn’t look closely enough to see the lines coming out from the corners of her eyes and the little puckers round her mouth. There was that barman in the Queen’s Head who wouldn’t believe she was a day over seventeen. It was her white skin, shiny about the nose, and her wispy fair hair and being as thin as one of those models that did it. Minty paid the man and smiled at him because he’d called her a kid, and then she went into the cemetery, carrying her flowers.

  If it weren’t for the graves it would have been like the country in there, all trees and bushes and grass. But it was no good saying that, Jock said. The graves were the reason for the trees. A lot of famous people were buried here but she didn’t know their names; she wasn’t interested. Over there was the canal and beyond it the gasworks. The gasometer loomed over the cemetery like some huge old temple, commemorating the dead. Ivy was the plant that grew most plentifully in here, creeping over the stones and slabs, up the columns, twining round the statues and pushing its tendrils through the splits and cracks in tombs. Some of the trees had black, shiny, pointed leaves, like leather cutouts, but most were leafless in winter, their bare branches sighing and shivering when the wind blew but hanging now limp in stillness. It was always quiet, as if there were an invisible barrier above the wall that kept out even the traffic noise.

  Auntie’s grave was at the end of the next path, on the corner where it met one of the main aisles. Of course, it wasn’t really her grave, it was just the place where Minty had buried her ashes. The grave belonged to Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life 15 December 1897, aged fifty-three, asleep in the arms of Jesus. When she’d brought Jock here she’d told him this was Auntie’s grandmother and he’d been impressed. For all she knew, it might be true. Auntie must have had two grandmothers like everyone else, just as she must have. She was going to have Auntie’s name put on the stone, she’d said. Jock said the grave was beautiful and moving, and the stone angel must have cost a fortune, even in those days.

  Minty took the dead stalks out of the stone pot and wrapped them in the paper that had been round the tulips and narcissi. She poured the water out of the bleach bottle into the vase. When she turned round for the flowers, she saw Jock’s ghost coming down the main aisle toward her. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweater and his leather jacket, but he wasn’t solid like he’d been last night. She could see through him.

  She said bravely, though she could hardly get the words out, “What d’you want, Jock? What have you come back for?”

  He didn’t speak. When he was about two yards from her he faded away. Just vanished like a shadow does when the sun goes in. Minty would have liked some wood to touch or maybe to have crossed herself, but she didn’t know which side to start from. She was shaking all over. She knelt on Auntie’s grave and prayed. Dear Auntie, keep him away. If you see him where you are tell him I don’t want him coming here. Always and forever your loving niece Araminta.

  Two people came along the path, the woman carrying a little bunch of carnations. They said, “Good afternoon,” the way no one ever would if you met them outside in the street. Minty got up off her knees and returned the greeting. She took her parcel of stalks and her empty bleach bottle, and dropped them in one of the litter bins. It had begun to rain. Jock used to say, Don’t worry about it, it’s only water. But was it? You didn’t know what dirt it picked up on its way down out of the sky.

  Chapter 2

  AUNTIE’S REAL NAME was Winifred Knox. She had two sisters and a brother, and they all lived at 39 Syringa Road with their parents. Arthur was the first to leave. He got married and then there were just the sisters at home. They were much older than Auntie, who had been an afterthought, the baby of the family. Kathleen got married and then Edna did and their father died. Auntie was left alone with her mother and cleaned offices for a living. Her engagement to Bert had been going on for years and years, but she couldn’t marry him while Mum was there dependent on her, in a wheelchair and needing everything done for her.

  Mum died the day before Auntie’s fortieth birthday. She and Bert waited a decent interval and then they got married. But it didn’t work, it was a nightmare.

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” Auntie said. “I suppose I’d led a sheltered life, I didn’t know anything about men. It was a nightmare.”

  “What did he do?” Minty asked.

  “You don’t want to know, a little innocent like you. I put an end to it after a fortnight. Good thing I’d kept this house on. If I’d any regrets it was not having any little ones of my own but then you came along like a bolt from the blue.”

  Minty was the bolt and her mother was the blue. Her name was Agnes and she’d been Auntie’s best friend at school, though they hadn’t seen so much of each other since then. No one was surprised when Agnes appeared with a baby; she’d been asking for it, going with all and sundry. There was never any mention of the baby’s father; it might have been a virgin birth for all the talk there was of him. It was the early sixties and people weren’t anywhere like as strict as they’d been when Auntie was young, but they still looked down their noses at Agnes and said the baby was a liability. Agnes brought her to Syringa Road sometimes and the two of them pushed the pram round Queen’s Park.

  That afternoon in May when Minty was six months old there was no talk of park visiting. Agnes said could she leave Minty with Auntie just for an hour while she went to visit her mum in the hospital. She’d brought a supply of nappies and a bottle of milk and a tin of puréed prunes for babies. It was funny how, whenever she told Minty this story, Auntie never left out the purére prunes.

  The time Agnes came was just after two and when it got to four Auntie began to wonder what had happened to her. Of course, she knew very well that when people say they’ll be back in an hour they don’t actually return for two or three hours; they’re just saying it to make you feel better, so she wasn’t worried. But she was when it got to six and seven. Luckily, what few shops there were in the area stayed open round the clock, so she asked the lady next door-that was before Laf and Sonovia came-to keep a lookout for Agnes and she took Minty in the pram and bought baby porridge and more milk and a bunch of bananas. Auntie’d never had any children of her own but she was a great believer in bananas as nourishing, the easiest to eat of all fruits, and liked by everyone.

  “Personally,” she’d said, “I’d regard anyone who turned up their nose at bananas with the deepest suspicion.”

  Agnes didn’t come back that day or the next. She never came back. Auntie made a bit of an effort to find her. She went round to Agnes’s parents’ place and found her mum had never been in hospital, she was as fit as a fiddle. They didn’t want the baby, no thanks, they’d been through all that when theirs were little and they weren’t starting again. Agnes’s dad said he reckoned she’d met someone who’d take her on but not the kid as well and this was her way of solving that problem.

  “Why don’t you hold on to her, Winnie? You’ve none of your own. She’d be company for you.”

  And Auntie had. They gave her the baby’s birth certificate and Agnes’s dad put two ten-pound notes in the envelope with it. Sometimes, when she’d got fond of Minty and looked on her as her own, Auntie worried a bit that Agnes would come back for her and she wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. But Agnes never did and when Minty was twelve the mum who hadn’t been in the hospital came round one day and said Agnes had been married and divorced and married again, and had gone to Australia with her second husband and her three kids and his four. It was quite a relief.

  Auntie had never adopted Minty or fostered her or any of those things. “I’ve no legal right to you,” she often said. “It’d be hard to say who you belong to. Still, no one’s showing any signs of wanting to take you away, are they? Poor little nobody�
��s child you are.”

  Minty left school when she was sixteen and got a job in the textile works in Craven Park. Auntie had brought her up to be very clean and though she’d been promoted to machinist, she didn’t like the fluff and lint that got everywhere. In those days everyone smoked and Minty didn’t like the smell or the ash either. Auntie knew the people who ran the dry cleaners. It wasn’t Immacue then but Harrow Road Dry-Cleaning and an old man called Mr. Levy owned it. Minty stayed there for the next eighteen years, at first when Mr. Levy’s son took over, then when it became Quicksilver Cleaners, finally working for Josephine O’Sullivan. Her life was very simple and straightforward. She walked to work in the mornings, worked for eight hours, mostly ironing, and walked home or got the 18 bus. The evenings she spent with Auntie, watching TV, eating their meal. Once a week they went to the cinema.

  Auntie was quite old when her voices began. Both her sisters had died by then but it was their voices she heard. Kathleen told her she ought to go to the pub after the cinema, take Minty, it was time Minty had a bit of life, and to make it the Queen’s Head, it was the only one round there that was properly clean. She used to go in there with George when they were courting. Auntie was a bit doubtful but the sisters were insistent and after she and Minty had been to see Heavenly Creatures the two of them went shyly into the College Park pub, the Queen’s Head. It was clean, or as clean as you could get. The barman was always wiping down the surfaces and with a clean cloth, not some old rag.

  Edna didn’t talk about pubs or having a good time. She kept telling Auntie to concentrate and she’d see her dead husband Wilfred. He was dying to “get through,” whatever that meant, though why Auntie should want to when she’d never been able to stand Wilfred Cutts she didn’t know. Then God started talking to Auntie and the sisters took a back seat. Young Mr. Levy said, “When you talk to God it’s praying, but when God talks to you it’s schizophrenia.”