The Clothes On Their Backs Read online

  I floated through time and space. I had complicated dreams, occasional nightmares. I thought I saw ghosts in the lift. I was neurotic, shy, prone to colds, flu, tonsillitis. I preferred the stillness of bed–the counterpane, the eiderdown quilt in winter–the enclosed space of my room, and smaller and smaller environments.

  Full of unfulfilled yearnings for what I couldn’t describe or understand, I bit down on things in frustration. I bit my nails and for a period of several weeks when I was eleven, drinking glasses, which bloodied my mouth. ‘Where does she get the strength in the jaw?’ my father asked, baffled.

  There was a short time during puberty when I had what is now called an eating disorder. I would only eat white or yellow foods, but since this left bread, butter, potatoes, chicken and cake, I got fat, not thin. Then suddenly I craved red: beef, tomatoes, apples, baked beans. My parents would talk about me when I had gone to bed, and I would pass them in the hall on the way to the bathroom for a night-time wee. They disagreed about whether or not I should see a doctor. My mother was for it, my father against. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘she’ll grow out of all this.’ ‘You don’t have to pay, you know,’ said my mother, ‘if that’s what you’re worried about.’ ‘It’s nothing to do with paying, she’s fine, all girls are hysterics anyway. Not you, of course, Berta.’

  In time I calmed down and began to look at life more philosophically and started to appreciate that the pain of being alive was normal and to be taken for granted.

  In adolescence I acquired self-consciousness and began to look at myself in the windows of shops when I was coming home from school. I started to observe others, in crowds and as individuals, and acquired the trick of being part of the rest of the human race. I made tentative overtures to other girls at school, the quiet outcasts, and became part of a studious group which went to the cinema at weekends, to the Academy on Oxford Street where we watched films in the foreign languages we were learning. Afterwards we went to Soho for a frothy coffee. Then I’d go home to Benson Court where my parents were watching light entertainment, quiz shows, soap operas and comedy half-hours on the television with a tray of supper on their lap. Ideas were categorically not their thing.

  My mother was born with one leg shorter than the other. I never knew her without her brown stick and the brown felt waistcoats she made for herself ‘to keep my back warm’. Coming home from school one day, I saw her trying to cross Marylebone High Street, by the pub, when the traffic was heavy. She didn’t see me. As she waited, nervously, for the cars and vans to slow, pushing the stick down the step of the pavement, readying herself for the little descent, a bird, a sparrow, alighted on her head. She must have felt the claws dig into her scalp, but she didn’t scream; she put her hand up and felt its cold dry wing with her fingers, and it did not fly off in a fright, or try to peck her eyes out. It hovered for a moment, an inch or two away from her nut-brown hair, before flying away, leaving a small white deposit on her head.

  Ashamed to be walking home, arm in arm, with a woman with bird shit on her hair; a woman not only with bird shit, but also with a thick wooden stick with a rubber tip; a woman who took her daughter’s arm and crooked it in hers, automatically, because she thought this was how a mother and daughter should promenade through the streets, to demonstrate their affection–not wanting to be seen with my own mother, I doubled back along Moxon Street and took a series of right turns to get me back to the same spot, and arrived home a few minutes later.

  I found her in the bathroom, washing her hair, smiling and singing a little tune from the radio. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I had a visit from a little bird just now, and though it’s not very nice at first, when this happens, I hear it brings good luck. Yes, I will be lucky tomorrow.’

  And she was. A letter came in the morning’s post: we had won £10 on the premium bonds. ‘It was the bird,’ she said. ‘Thank you, bird!’

  So that was her.

  Until I was ten I was completely unaware that I had a relative. Then one day the doorbell rang. My father opened it in the same way he would open the door to anyone, with the chain on, peering through the crack.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said in his piping, immigrant’s voice with its mangled vowels. ‘I know who it isn’t, because it isn’t rent day so don’t pretend you have come for your money.’

  A couple of thick fingers felt their way through the gap and grasped my father’s sharp knuckles. ‘Ervin, let me in, it’s me, your brother.’

  The moment my father heard that voice he slammed the door shut with such a bang that it shook the flat and my mother and I came running out into the hall to see what was going on.

  ‘We’re no relation!’ my father cried, breaking out into a sweat on his nose. ‘Go away or I call the police.’

  ‘Ervin, I bought a beautiful bar of chocolate. Wait till you see the size of it! Let me in and we’ll sit down and talk.’

  ‘Khasene hobn solst du mit dem malekh hamovesis tokhter!’ my father screamed.

  ‘Ha ha! He wants I should marry the daughter of the Angel of Death,’ my uncle said to the girl he had brought with him and gave her a kiss on the cheek with his wobbly lips.

  ‘Fransn zol esn dein layb!’ yelled my father, and opened the door so that his brother could appreciate the full force of his voice which he knew was quite little and needed uninterrupted air to amplify, with projectile spitting.

  I was standing with my hands on the door frame staring at the visitor with saucer eyes. I had never in my life seen anyone dressed like him, let alone the girl. A man in an electric-blue mohair suit, black hand-stitched suede shoes, his wrist flashing with a fancy watch attached to a diamond bracelet. And the black girl on his arm, in a nylon leopardskin coat with matching pillbox hat, carrying a plastic crocodile handbag with a gilt clasp.

  An uncle!

  The man looked at me. I was all black eyes in a sallow face. A dark little child, taking after my mother; he and my father were fair in the complexion with reddish hair. This volcanic eruption had sent me into a state of catatonic shock, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move. We never had any visitors, apart from the rent man. I saw no one except the refined residents of Benson Court, some of whom spoke to me and gave me sweets, after being carefully vetted by my parents so I just stood there, rigid with surprise, as if the moon, the silvery ball, had lowered itself down from heaven on ropes and pulleys and the Man in the Moon had opened a trap door and climbed out in our hall.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked the girl, in a hoarse voice.

  ‘He’s wishing venereal disease on me,’ my uncle translated for her, rolling his eyes. She giggled and coughed.

  ‘In front of the child!’ my father screamed. ‘Vivien, go into your room.’ But I didn’t budge. I didn’t know what venereal disease was. I let the word roll over my tongue, and committed them to memory, for later, when I would consult my birthday dictionary

  ‘Oy, Vivien, come here to Uncle Sandy, I got chocolate for you.’ He opened the gilt clasp of the girl’s crocodile bag and pulled out a bar of Toblerone the size and weight of a hammer. ‘I bet you never saw one of these outside a shop before. It’s from Switzerland, you know, they make the bar of chocolate like the shape of the mountains!’

  ‘Migigul zolst in henglayhter, by tog zolst du hengen, un bay nacht zolst du brenen.’

  ‘Now he wants for me to be a chandelier, to hang by day and burn by night. My own brother.’ My uncle grabbed the mohair crotch of his trousers and gave his penis a yank. The girl started laughing: she opened her mouth and let out a series of high-pitched yelps, gulping for air with each one. I saw inside her pink mouth, and her big pink tongue and the metal fillings in her teeth.

  ‘You are no brother, you wolf!’ My father was going mad, I had never known him so enraged. His eyelashes were magnified and pushing up against the panes of his dusty, black-rimmed glasses. I pressed back further against the door but had no inclination for flight. I had never been to the theatre. This is what I thought it would be like
–shouting and large gestures. People transformed.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ my uncle said, laughing, his bulbous lower lip shaking up and down. ‘The same mammy bore us, blood of our blood!’

  ‘May she rest in peace. Don’t you desecrate her name with your filthy mouth.’

  ‘Ervin, let me in.’

  ‘You’ll never set foot in this house. Not while there’s a breath left in my body.’ And my father slammed the door, went into the living room and turned on the TV to its loudest volume, a higher notch than he had ever dared before.

  On the other side of the front door my uncle let out a theatrical sigh, shrugged, turned away, walked down the stairs in his hand-stitched suede shoes, and I could hear the girl ask him what he was going to do with the chocolate. ‘You can have it,’ he told her. I ran to the window and looked down at them in the street, the West Indian girl standing on the pavement, chocolate round her face and my uncle with his fabulous car, the silver Jaguar, opening the driver’s side and calling to her to get in, not opening the passenger door like a gentleman, because he was no gentleman and she was just a teenage whore. But this sight remains with me to this day, that sunlit Saturday morning at the door of Benson Court in 1963.

  Eight months later, he was in prison. Agony for my parents, night after night for five weeks, to be forced against their will to watch the reports of the case on television, unable to switch off the set because then the living room would turn into a tomb of unbreakable silence. And to try, and fail, to shield their daughter from the man in the dock with nearly the same last name, who came from the same place, who talked English with the same accent as my mother and father, whom I had seen with my own eyes at the front door of our flat, arguing with my daddy and calling him brother.

  A brother is, to a person’s daughter, an uncle. There was no way round it. I had a relative.

  ‘But what has that man done, Daddy?’ I asked, at once.

  ‘Don’t ask questions. No one ever had a quiet life by asking questions, and a life that isn’t peaceful is no life at all.’

  But my parents’ life was not so much peaceful, to me, as inert. A quarter of a century hibernation.

  For the rest of my childhood, my parents and I rolled slowly and quietly like three torpid marbles across the lino floor, while below, under the plaster ceiling rose and the ornamental cornices, the longest-serving resident of the flats moved silently about in perpetual semi-darkness, her lamps fitted with low-watt bulbs and shrouded in fringed shawls to dim them down to hazy areolae of amber light, like car headlamps on a foggy morning. Occasionally, she played an unrecognisable gramophone record. Every night, around 8 p.m., she dressed up in a fox-fur coat and down-at-heel suede shoes with torn grey satin bows, to tramp the night streets of London; a vagabond coming home just after dawn, when you were woken from vertiginous dreams by the elevator’s clank and the slamming of the front door and the rattle of the stained glass panel in its wooden frame.

  Who knew why she kept these odd nocturnal hours, or why she made herself up with shaky hands–the eyes of her lined face rimmed with smudged kohl, her doll-like dots of rouge, her Cupid’s bow lips painted blood red, as if she had bitten into someone’s flesh and sucked out its goodness? Maybe she had a werewolf in her. We all have these inner drives, like dogs biting our intestines. I know I do.

  Until mid-afternoon she slept, unless she was lying, eyes wide open, memorising what she had witnessed on her voyages across the city. She had been seen as far away as Kilburn, climbing the streets, heading further and further north, before dropping down with exhaustion as the light rose. Why did she walk, to what purpose? What was she searching for or what was she escaping? I have no idea, even now forty years later.

  One evening when I was seventeen, I was coming home late after the final rehearsals for the school play, which was the story of the Romanov princess Anastasia (or rather that girl who claimed to be her, the Polish peasant Franziska Schanzkowska). I wasn’t acting in it, I was the prompt, an unseen voice. It was the fifth of November. Fireworks had begun to explode in back gardens. A roaring bonfire was being lit on Primrose Hill. Mrs Prescott was standing on the steps of Benson Court fastening the buttons of her coat when an almighty explosion rocked the street from behind the mansion block opposite. She stood, mute, trembling.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t like the bangs,’ she said, in a papery voice.

  ‘I expect it reminds you of the war,’ I replied, sympathetically, because this is what my mother always said, every year (‘the horrible bombs!’)

  She shook her head. ‘I never liked bangs.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t go out tonight,’ I said. ‘It will be bangs all the way.’

  ‘I like the coloured lights. I just wish they were silent. I like to look, not hear.’

  Silver rain showered above the chimneypots. A rocket whistled. She shuddered. Her vulnerability affected me, it reminded me of my lonely years in the bedroom. She smelt of roses and face powder and sadness. These scents caught and held me, there on the step. I am only five feet four inches, but still, I towered over her.

  ‘I think you’re right, I won’t go until it’s all over,’ she said.

  She turned back. I noticed how her Cupid’s bow bled into the lines above her mouth. I had never seen this phenomenon close up before, because my mother, who also had lines, never wore make-up. I thought she must spend hours in front of the mirror painting her lipstick into the cracks with a tiny brush. You would need good eyesight and a steady hand, neither of which she seemed to possess, for she continued to tremble and her eyes peered at me as if I was someone she once knew.

  ‘You live in the flat below us,’ I said. ‘We hear your records, sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t play any records.’

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘That’s not me, it’s a visitor.’

  I had never seen a visitor, but then not everyone had seen Uncle Sándor.

  We ascended in the lift.

  ‘Is your father the one with the accent?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  The doors of the lift clanked open at the second floor.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to join me for a glass of sherry,’ she said, turning to me, as she stepped out.

  I followed her into the flat, entering twilight. She poured the sherry into a glass and a dead spider floated up on the surface; I fished it out with my fingers and dropped on the floor next to my chair. I licked the inner surfaces of the glass, cautiously, to try the taste of alcohol, which was sweet and heady. After she had looked at me in silence for several minutes, which did not bother me at all because that was what my father did, she practised opening her mouth a few times, began to form a word, halted, paused, started again, then finally said: ‘Why do you dress like that?’

  ‘It’s my school uniform.’

  ‘I mean when you are not at school.’

  ‘I don’t know. I just wear what’s in the wardrobe.’

  ‘You know what I would like? To wash your hair.’

  ‘Why? My hair is clean.’

  ‘I’d like to style it. Come on.’

  She put her hand delicately on my arm. Her eyes were gentle, not crazy, a faded watery blue, the Miss Havisham of the windy, chaotic, dangerous streets. If you grow up in Benson Court, you take it for granted that people are different, not all the same. She was weird, but so were my parents. And she was both frail and strong at the same time, frail in the body but tough to survive the night.

  I got up and followed her into the bathroom. She ran the taps and lightly pressed my head down over the sink. The water coursed over my head, and I felt the cold trickle of shampoo on my scalp. Her fingers, suddenly strong, began to massage the liquid into a foam. My body was suffused with delightful tingling sensations.

  For several minutes she rubbed my scalp with a towel then began to wind my hair around large rollers. Her fingers knew exactly what they were doing. I looked in the mir
ror. My head had expanded into a series of large metal curls clamped with pins.

  ‘Now sit by the fire,’ she said, ‘while it dries completely.’

  A long time passed. Outside the explosions were getting much worse and cats were shrieking in terror and dogs barked like they’d lost their minds. She put her hands over her ears and shrivelled up behind her cushions. Flashes and sparks and a hail of light penetrated the curtains.

  ‘It’s going on for ages,’ I said.

  ‘Every year it’s more loud.’

  At length, she removed the rollers and began to brush my hair.

  ‘Look,’ she said and pointed to the mirror.

  I had entered the flat with a black bush of tangled, frizzy curls, flattened and held down by brown kirby grips and two tortoiseshell slides. Now I had a smooth dark helmet of waves. I found myself in two halves, the interior and exterior of my own head. It was such a profound alienation at first, such a mental crisis that I began rocking back and forth on the rubber soles of my school shoes.