Authors: Barbara Trapido
‘You wet your bed every night as an act of aggression,’ he once announced to her helpfully before an audience of adult strangers. ‘You do it because you hate your mother.’ Mervyn’s feelings against his own mother ran so high that he was capable, quite literally, of tearing his hair upon discovering that Ali had humoured the old woman with the gift of a silk scarf on her birthday, or had sent her an annual ten-penny Passover card.
The day that Ali met Noah had begun badly for Camilla. Always a scrupulously conscientious child, anxious to cover herself on all fronts against the possible wrath of schoolteachers; always in the vanguard of homework doers and bringers of magazine pictures for school projects, Camilla seldom boobed, but on this particular day she had risen late. She had gone to bed too late the night before after some trouble over her homework. Ali had never known Camilla to hesitate over homework before, but on this occasion the teacher had set an impossible task. She had asked the class to write about a time when they had been naughty. Poor Camilla, who had never been naughty, could think of nothing to write about and had eventually, with considerable reluctance and tears, agreed to accept one of Ali’s innocent childhood escapades on loan for the occasion. Even then, choosing the right one had taken its time. There was for example the episode, whose awfulness left Camilla wincing, when Ali and her friend had trimmed the fringing on her friend’s mother’s rug. But
trimming it straight had proved so difficult that they had had to keep cutting it shorter and shorter until finally they had hacked into the weave.
‘Don’t tell me any more,’ Camilla said, clapping her hands over her ears. ‘It’s too awful.’ She had found rising next morning difficult, but worse was to follow. As she entered the kitchen for a hasty mouthful of breakfast, she stopped suddenly in her tracks and clutched the doorjamb.
‘I need a games kit,’ she said in a voice drenched with sorrow, ‘I need it today for after school. I forgot to tell you.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Ali said, scrambling together Camilla’s busfare in haste. ‘The only thing to do, I suppose, is to pretend you’re having a period.’ Already, poor little narrow-hipped Camilla was, as they say, a ‘woman’. The week after she had turned eleven she had hobbled home from school, limping from two raw patches on the insides of her thighs caused by chafing from dried blood. She had soaked through the two Kotex pads given her by the science teacher and had spent most of the afternoon in the medical room. Monthly thereafter, and for eight days at a stretch, she passed what looked like gouts of raw liver among a copious gory ooze. Since child modesty would not permit her the use of internal tampons, she swallowed Disprin with admirable patience, used Vaseline on the raw patches and refused to see a doctor.
‘I can’t pretend,’ Camilla said, still standing in the doorway. ‘I’m hopeless at lies.’ And she burst into tears. ‘She’ll know it’s not true. I’ll get detention.’
‘I’ll get you the kit,’ Ali said quickly, appeasingly. ‘I’ll buy it this afternoon. I’ll be at the school gate by hometime. Promise.’ Camilla wiped her strange alluring yellow eyes on the last of the kitchen paper as she cast about for a new source of anxiety.
’Please
don’t be late, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Please, or I’ll get detention.’
‘Promise,’ Ali said. ‘What do you need?’
‘White plimsolls,’ Camilla said, snatching up her school bag. ‘And navy shorts. And a white T-shirt. Thanks, Mummy.’
‘Run along,’ Ali said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘It’s all got to be labelled,’ Camilla said over her shoulder ‘And in a bag, or we get detention. Please, Mummy.’
‘Labelled,’ Ali said. ‘Right. Don’t worry.’
‘The bag’s got to be labelled too,’ Camilla said, as she took her leave. ‘If it isn’t I’ll get detention.’
Ali, after the daily rinsing of Camilla’s sheets, took her bicycle to her cleaning job, noticing on the way that Virginia Woolf had lost the Blu-tack on her upper-left-hand corner and was sagging inwards in neck-arching indignity. She spent her two hours among soapsuds and alien crockery, drawing coffee cups and ashtrays and crumpled underwear out from under the sofas where her bachelor men habitually hid these things in consideration of her feelings. Then she pedalled home intending to make a sandwich and some coffee before going on to the shops. She dug out an old cushion cover and converted it into a kitbag, manufacturing a hem and drawstring and stitching on a name-tape. She put aside two more name-tapes with a view to stitching these on to the shorts and shirt in the Ladies loo in the town just as she heard the sound of Mervyn fitting his key into the lock.
‘I came for the paint roller,’ he said jauntily. Defensiveness caught Ali by the throat, for she had been discovered plying her needle, while Mervyn’s girlfriend, Eva, would in all likehood be in the Social Sciences library working on her bibliography.
‘It’s under the sink,’ Ali said with the belligerence of shame. ‘But if Eva wants to indulge in a little home decorating, paint rollers are available in every branch of Woolworths, you know – or does she believe that property is theft?’ Mervyn came towards her with his brilliant treacherous smile, his teeth, like Camilla’s, small, white and strong.
’I’m
doing the painting,’ he said. He had never painted walls before in his life. ‘Eva is too busy. Are you planning to make an issue over a paint roller then? Why do women of your sort always
pick quarrels which centre round utensils and domestic territory?’ He smiled upon her indulgently as upon some poor, dish-clout scullery maid.
‘Listen, Mervyn, I’m in a hurry,’ Ali said. ‘Take the bloody thing and with pleasure. As I said, it’s under the sink. Only if you’re planning to do the place over in “Nigger Brown”, just rinse it through before you return it to me. That’s all.’
‘Racist!’ Mervyn said. He had positioned himself suddenly too close for comfort and had picked up the makeshift kitbag which he was turning over and over in his hands.
‘It’s Camilla’s gym bag,’ Ali said nervously. ‘I have to take it to her right now. She needs it now.’
‘So do you,’ he said, snatching eagerly at double entendre. ‘That’s going by the way you’re acting with me today. You’re a handsome lady aren’t you?’
‘Marquess of Queensbury rules, okay?’ Ali said, swallowing quickly and wishing tears wouldn’t start so easily from her eyes these days. ‘The paint roller is all yours. Please. Take it and go away. Please, Mervyn.’
Mervyn put down the kitbag to enjoy his rising power. ‘I’m off wives and daughters as you know,’ he said, ‘but a part-time mistress or two is something else, not so? Anytime you’re interested, I’m open to offers, duckie.’ He took a step towards the mantelpiece where he began to fondle a recent school photograph of Camilla which Ali had inserted into a small shell-collage frame. ‘Her too,’ he said, for the pleasure of breaking the bounds of good taste. ‘If she doesn’t baulk at incest, that is.’
‘Are you on drugs, Mervyn?’ Ali asked, recovering spirit under the influence of his offensiveness.
‘Tell her I’d expect her to menstruate first,’ he said. ‘No representation without menstruation. Not in my bed.’
‘I’m sorry, Mervyn, I’m off,’ Ali said as she felt telling red blotches form upon the skin around her collar bone. She snatched up the kitbag and made for the door. A mild wave of nausea
passed over her as she mounted her bicycle, caused only partly by the absence of lunch.
Acquiring the games kit was not an easy thing. Shorts were unseasonal by early September and the few satiny ones left in the sports shops were all beyond Ali’s means. White T-shirts came with saucy messages across the chest and Camilla needed a plain one. Furthermore, Camilla’s feet, being unusually narrow and elegant, fell out of regular gym shoes and required the high-lacing Dunlop kind which two out of three sports shops did not carry in her size.
Some hours had elapsed before Ali finally found suitable shorts in a charity shop, a little frayed and rumpled, and smelling slightly of body odour. The T-shirt was solved by a kindly shop assistant who advised her to ask in the men’s underwear department for a small cotton vest. The problem had been one not of scarcity, but of terminology. With some agitation Ali returned to her bicycle only to remember the name-tapes. Mervyn had caused her to leave them at home. Bent on acquiring a marking pen, she stepped hurriedly off the kerb into the street only to feel the hot wind of a passing car and – at the same moment – a hand gripping her arm to pull her back. That was when she fell shaking against Noah’s remarkable forty-four-inch chest.
‘Don’t do that again, lady,’ he said. ‘Not while I’m watching. It sure scares the hell out of me.’ He supported her a few paces till she could lean against a wall. Then he checked her pulse, registering as he did so a half-dozen dubious lesions on the back of her right hand which she had dismissed as glorified freckles.
‘So stupid of me,’ she said in some embarrassment, but Noah’s companion stepped forth heatedly.
‘The guy was driving like a cowboy!’ he said. Arnie Weinberg, in contrast to the sobriety of Noah’s appearance, wore his bushy, mouse-coloured hair carelessly overgrown and its tendency was to grow not down but sideways. He had on, over a sleeveless T-shirt, a small goatskin jerkin which he wore hairy side in. A large mole was manifest in the vicinity of his left bicep and a copious
protrusion of yellowish underarm hair emerged from the arm-holes of the T-shirt. He wore, besides thick steel-framed glasses, denim jeans and some highly pneumatic running shoes. Both men were staring at her the way she remembered the dentist doing once, just before she had passed out in the chair. Arnie was holding out to her a Mars Bar which he had drawn from his back pocket.
‘Eat,’ he said. Noah threw the car keys into Arnie’s hands.
‘Go get the car,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll take her home.’ Ali was already tearing paper from the sugary goo.
‘No really,’ she said, backing further into the wall. ‘I’m all right.’ But Arnie had already left them.
‘Believe me,’ Noah said, ‘you are very shaken.’
‘I can’t go home,’ Ali said. ‘That’s the problem.’ She held the kitbag aloft in a shaking hand. ‘I’ve got these to deliver to my daughter’s school. She needs them.’
‘No problem,’ Noah said. He used the expression frequently and to good effect. Problems of the kind which beset Ali vanished before him as chaff before the wind. ‘I’m Noah Glazer. I am, as it happens, a doctor.’
‘Thanks,’ Ali said. ‘I’m Alison Bobrow. I have to deliver these for three-thirty.’
Noah glanced at his watch and said promptly, with his peculiar and slightly compulsive moral gravity, ‘If you have children, Mrs Bobrow, you owe it to them to take better care of yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. She was taken both by his unusual kindness and by the puzzling awfulness of his pale yellow drip-dry shirt which he wore with cuff-links. Why cuff-links on a shirt like that? Ali wore thirdhand silk shirts from jumble sales with real shell buttons and threadbare cuffs. She laundered them by hand and ironed them with love. Nothing would have induced her to be seen dead in primrose drip-dry.
‘I should think you saved me from the jaws of death just then,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘We are standing appropriately, do
you see, on the very spot where the poor Protestant bishops were burned to death.’
‘Oh my,’ Noah said, observing the plaque in the college wall. He considered her remark to be eccentric and examined her curiously. ‘Isn’t that something?’ he said.
When she smiled it began to occur to him that, for those who liked this kind of woman, she was certainly good to look at even through pallor and exhaustion. She was much too thin and wore rather butch sandals, but with her white pointed face and long white neck and curiously variegated pale hair, her head and shoulders took some beating. He found himself remembering the twelve dancing princesses who had worn out their shoes at the enchanted lake. The memory startled him since the story had been read to him as a young child by his mother, only once and long ago. Noah was a person who had put by childish things early in life and, besides, his tastes in women had always run along more robust lines towards ruby lips and ample haunches in tight skirts like Shirley’s. He had never been a man for pale, underslept enchantresses.
As Arnie honked from the opposite kerb they crossed the street to the car, where Noah handed her into the front passenger seat while Arnie stepped into the back.
‘I got the bastard’s car!’ he said excitedly. ‘Parked just there down the street. Can you believe it? The guy drives like a psychopath and then he parks half a block down the street. Boy, is he going places fast!’
‘D’you take his number?’ Noah said. Arnie slapped his forehead in self-reproach.
‘Shit!’ he said, ‘I forgot. I was too busy. I kicked a good-size dent in the rear mudguard, see. Real British ticky tacky that car. Put your toe to the metal and it crumples just like a Coke can.’
‘You what?’ Noah said caustically, registering controlled paternal annoyance. Arnie was the best research student he had ever had but had already caused him displeasure that day by having driven Noah’s car to a party the previous night
which had extended into the morning and having then come to the hospital research unit at noon to return it direct from the party, dressed – as Noah said – like Robinson Crusoe in jogging shoes. Hurriedly Noah checked his mirror and began to manoeuvre into the stream of traffic.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. Ali was beginning to enjoy herself in spite of her shock and her anxiety over Camilla’s clothing. Both men had begun to intrigue her. She wondered whether they were father and son. Or were they sexually involved with each other? For what reasons would a rigorously straight man in grey flannels keep company with a bent man in goatskin? She took them for American tourists.
‘Where do you come from?’ she said.
‘From the hospital, ma’am,’ Arnie said. ‘You’re okay with us. We’re just harmless doctors.’
‘Go on,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t believe you. Leastways, I believed him, but not you. Are you telling me you do ward rounds in a white coat?’
Arnie laughed. ‘Well, not exactly. Not right now. I work for him in medical research. You think I don’t look like a doctor?’