Authors: Barbara Trapido
‘You look distinctly alternative to me if you’ll pardon the liberty,’ Ali said. ‘Frankly, you look like a person who buys prayer postcards ten pence off in the Whole Earth Bookshop.’ Arnie laughed again, but Noah, for whom flippant conversation, like eccentric dress, had its proper times and places, merely glanced down gravely at her seat-belt fitting.
‘Fasten the seat belt, Mrs Bobrow. Like so,’ he said after watching her wrestle with the clasp. Click.
Suddenly a police car was drawn up beside them, forcing Noah to pull in. There were two policemen in the front and, in the back, black hair parted dead centre, moustached and red with fury, was the driver of the fast car which had almost collided with Ali.
‘That’s the one!’ he yelled, as plummy British as they come in his period piece, Battle of Britain voice. ‘The one in the back with long hair like a girl.’
‘I
am
a girl,’ Arnie said to Ali’s immediate delight and to Noah’s dismay. Arnie leaned on the window ledge. ‘What’s going on around here?’ He damned himself instantly, not only with his general lack of deference but with the combination of his transatlantic accent and his studenty dress.
‘Oh Christ,’ Noah said gloomily, under his breath.
‘Arrest him officer!’ yelled the fast-car man. ‘Go on! Do your duty as a servant of the Crown. By God I’ll see that the law has your balls, you damned Yankee trouble-maker. I’m warning you, I have the power to do it.’ He fumed at some considerable length about his uncle the judge and his brother in the Black Watch.
‘Jesus, Noah, is this guy for real?’ Arnie said incredulously, employing a regrettably audible aside. He had been in the country for only four weeks and could not believe his unattuned ears.
‘Bloody vandal!’ blustered the fast-car man. One of the policemen got out and ordered Arnie rather abruptly to do the same.
‘Pardon me, officer,’ Noah said, intervening with calculated sobriety, ‘but I have a woman here suffering from shock. Your passenger almost knocked her down as a matter of fact. May we get under way, please?’
‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’ said the policeman. Noah sighed.
‘Sure it’s my vehicle,’ he said.
‘Licence, sir?’ said the policeman. Ali began to twitch inwardly in consideration of the time and to steal glances at Noah’s watch as he reached into the glove pocket for his licence. Camilla needed her games togs by three-thirty did she not? She needed them though the heavens fell. Yet here was a pair of gallant strangers being impounded as they rose in her defence. Noah’s watch, being annoyingly digital, was difficult to read upside down, but his licence – international and valid for one year – was mercifully without fault. The policeman after some scrutiny returned it with an approving nod.
‘We shall need a statement from your friend, sir, that’s all,’ he
said. ‘Never to worry. We’ll have him down the station for you if you’d like to call by later.’ Noah looked from Ali to Arnie, weighing their respective needs with care.
‘I’ll call by the police station in a half-hour,’ he said to Arnie. Ali watched with growing awkwardness as Arnie stepped undaunted into the police car alongside his expostulating accuser.
‘Whatever are we going to do?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ Noah said. ‘I guess nobody ever got into real trouble for kicking a car in sneakers. Not that I heard of.’
‘It’s all my fault,’ Ali said. ‘It’s dreadful. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Mrs Bobrow,’ Noah said abruptly. ‘Who was it kicked the car? Just tell me now where we are heading. Your daughter’s school, right?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ali said, uneasily, who hated to give traffic directions for the reason that left and right had never become second nature to her. To know right from left required a quick translation from treble clef through to one’s right thumb on Middle C. A process which she feared would not be quick enough for a person who gave out an impression of decidedly practical competence.
They were late, of course. Not very late, but late enough. Camilla was immediately visible to Ali, seated woefully upon the low brick wall of the school. For Camilla, the relief of seeing her mother brought on instant hysteria. She flew at Ali, breathing misery and hurling wild reproaches.
‘You’re late!’ she snivelled. ‘You
promised.
Now I’ve missed the kit inspection and I’ve got detention tomorrow and it’s your fault. You
promised
me, Mummy. You promised!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said repeatedly. ‘Please Camilla, I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’ Noah tried at first not to watch but he couldn’t prevent his ears being a party to the protracted exchange. It was all most extraordinary, he thought. An eleven-year-old child who needed parents to run to and fro with sports equipment? Eleven-year-olds, as he recalled from his own sons, were people who earned their own pocket money and went back-packing all summer without writing home. Furthermore, he liked respect
for mothers. Who was Mr Bobrow that he allowed this kind of misconduct to go on?
Was
there a Mr Bobrow? Here was a woman, weak with shock from a narrowly averted automobile accident, humbling herself before a hysterical child over a sports bag. He leaned over and opened the back door.
‘Jump in little lady,’ he said, with pointed severity. ‘Your mother almost got knocked down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said to him. ‘She’s upset.’ She looked furtively over her shoulder at Camilla hiccuping in the back seat and biting her lip between spasms of mucus.
‘That’s okay,’ Noah said with level restraint. ‘I’ve had kids myself. Fasten the seat belt, Mrs Bobrow.’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said, making a flustered rush upon the object in the hopes of catching it unawares.
‘How about if I make a charge for every time you say you’re sorry?’ Noah said.
‘Sorry,’ Ali said and blushed. Noah shifted into gear with a stifled smile.
‘Where to now?’ he said. ‘Right? Left? Mrs Bobrow, please, do I make a right?’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said.
They lived in the same street, though they had never seen each other before. Engrossed bachelor men, car-borne and coming home late, don’t often notice local mothers and housewives, nor do housewives notice absentee householders. Added to that, Noah lived in a modern architect-designed infill house with almost no windows to the street side and great shop-window panes to the back. That being the way with modern glazing procedures, the windows were either all or nothing. Furthermore, he lived on the first floor, because at ground level his house boasted the only garage in the street. He was, in short, by geography and inclination cut off from the life of the street. He had bought the house nine months before for its proximity to the hospital, its trouble-free plastic drainpipes and its adequate central heating system. He had lived in England for no more
than a month when an agent had come up with the house and, since nobody had ever occupied the place before, the transfer had been satisfactorily uncomplicated and speedy. Ali lived, by contrast, in a prettily got-up terraced workman’s cottage with a slightly crumbling stone lintel over a sanded front door, window frames which rattled loudly in a high wind and a structural crack running the length of the back. From her position within it she constituted a magnet for almost every social problem in the neighbourhood.
‘Take care, now,’ Noah said as he delivered her to her door with her dejected little daughter. ‘I’ll come by this evening,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know what happened.’
When noah returned with Arnie that evening, as he had promised, the door was opened to him by Camilla who, having recovered herself, was modelling her hard-earned running shorts.
‘Mother at home?’ he said. Glancing with sideways eyes because the memory of her emotional display that afternoon now embarrassed her, she nodded and turned to show them in. The inviting half-moons of her pre-teen female buttocks protruding from the tacky but well-fitting shorts was not a sight to pass Arnie by and he whistled through his teeth. Camilla’s delicate but undeniable beauty was already proving to be an embarrassment to her on the school bus, where clumsy schoolboys jostled as they passed her and cleared their throats pointedly in the hope of catching her attention. Arnie was in another league, of course. Bathed and shaven, he was now dressed in a snowy-white Indian shirt with a small collarless neckband and immaculate canvas jeans. He presented a less bizarre appearance than that which Ali had encountered earlier. He wore his hair neatly combed though it flounced thickly at the temples like Mark Twain’s. The toenails protruding from his leather sandals were manicured and scrupulously clean.
‘Call me when you’re sixteen, kid,’ he said.
‘Eighteen,’ Noah said firmly. ‘Aren’t you in enough trouble
with the law already?’ He stepped into the living room from the tiny hall.
‘Mrs Bobrow?’ he said. ‘Mrs Bobrow?’ Because Ali, although the hour was almost eight, was giving her whole attention to four small girls who were clearly not her own. They appeared to be engaged in amateur theatricals and were at that moment playing dead upon the creamy Spanish rug, breaking out of stiffness into brief giggles occasionally, and scuffing at the rug with their sharp little patent shoes. One of them, a rosy blonde, had taken off her pants and was uninhibitedly airing her pudgy, six-year-old pubes. Noah stood and waited, watching the story unfold. Ali was narrator and also, intermittently, villain and stepmother.
‘Please,’ she said, looking up for a moment, ‘sit down.’
‘Get on with it,’ said the blonde child rudely. Noah sat down warily in one of Ali’s fragile basket chairs which tilted gently leftwards under his weight. He hit his head lightly upon an appliquéd lampshade which hung – for aesthetic reasons – too low over the chair and he steadied it politely with his hand.
‘Hi,’ Arnie said affably, as he stepped with a wide stride over the four recumbent girls.
‘Shut up,’ said the vocal blonde. ‘We’re acting. We’re the Snow Whites and we’re dead.’
‘What,
all
of you?’ Arnie said, in lively disbelief. ‘You’re
all
Snow Whites? Isn’t there only one?’
‘We all wanted to be her, so there’s four,’ said the child conclusively. ‘Now shut up.’ Noah observed meanwhile that Ali had about her a trance-like serenity which came sometimes from growing beyond despair. It gave her a touching, frail nobility.
‘And the prince?’ Arnie said, needling persistently. ‘He gets
all
of you? He gets the four dead girls?’ A small sullen Prince Charming, brutalised by a recent haircut, was lurking in a corner quietly fiddling with his genitals as he straddled Ali’s broomhandle – his makeshift horse – awaiting his cue.
‘Belt up,’ said the blonde. ‘Or bugger off.’ What Noah and
Arnie were witnessing was the vestige of an open-house policy established by Mervyn who had declared himself in favour of communal living and neighbourhood support. The nuclear family was an evil, he said, and privacy a bourgeois luxury. The problem for Ali was not that Mervyn had now gone. It had always been that where the nuclear family still held as the norm – and the normal, by definition, stubbornly adhered to such norms – the people who invaded Ali’s life to consume her Nescafe in great quantities and to unload their burdens, or their offspring, were on the whole in no emotional or material position ever to support Ali in their turn. They left her their children to care for while they listened in pubs to songs of protest and left her their marijuana plants to water while they set off in the summer to doss on Greek beaches.
They were the kind of people whom Noah within days had summed up without qualm or conscience as unworthy, leeching drop-outs. The idea that one might be soft enough in the head to run an emotional soup-kitchen from one’s own home was for him beyond belief. He was content to have the state touch him for taxes to support the casualties of urban dislocation. But one’s own living room – that was something else. Social workers and psychiatrists operated from behind the protective barriers of office desks, as was only right and proper.
The house, as it struck Noah, was small, cluttered and distinctly arty. It was furnished in a style which was painstakingly labour-intensive and revealed itself as a pretty, living collage of its occupant’s life’s collectings. She had, against the pale pink-glazed walls, a glass-fronted bureau which she had stripped years before, inch by inch, with a kitchen knife and a deadly chlorinated solvent which Noah later banished from the store cupboard as a substance whose use resulted in lung damage. The bureau back Ali had papered with pastel, hand-blocked wallpaper and she had filled its shelves, not with books, but with scalloped pink and white crockery, which sported a pattern of smocked rustics rolling hoops along winding cart tracks. Large
areas of wall were covered with child art presumed to be Camilla’s – in mirror-clip and plexiglass mounts, and with antique silk embroideries. These last were enclosed within old stucco frames whose moulded Grecian acanthus leaves were here and there quietly returning to plaster dust. Ali’s chairs were almost all of latticed cane like the one in which he sat and padded with homemade unbleached calico cushions. In the midst of this cloyingly female house, this tastefully prettified dolls’ house full of china and cane, were five ravaging and ill-mannered children who ought, he believed firmly, to have been at home and in bed.
The story wound to its close. Prince Charming dragged the broom across the rug, and stumbled, descending with sudden viciousness upon the pelvis of the blonde girl.
‘Easy!’ Arnie said, wishing to intercede, but the blonde required no defence.
‘Leave off, Darren!’ she said, getting her knee up. ‘This ain’t the effing Sleeping Beauty. You’re supposed to get our effing apples out.’ One by one he rolled them over and thumped them roughly between the shoulder blades with his stockinged right foot, slamming their ribs into the floorboards.
‘There’s yer apples out,’ he said, waiting for praise. Then he led them, all astride the broomstick, into their own prematurely jaded little once upon a time beyond the Spanish rug. At the far end of the room, which was long and narrow, having once been two, Camilla, who had shut herself off from the scene, was quietly bent over her maths homework, biting her lip with concentration and counting on her fingers.