the first place. She was background music before then, heavily pregnant when we moved in and leading to a few do you think they know they’re alive? conversations: babies in stomachs and bodies in general and breast-feeding (it can’t be right). But babies, they perform the same function as dogs do in human interaction. You pretend you’ve not noticed the person queuing next to you for the past three months and then all of a sudden it’s ‘hello, fella’ and ‘isn’t he sweet?’ and ‘does he bite?’
This house has Shirley on one side, mr faceless on the other and behind it, garden-to-garden back-to-back, it has naked neighbours. These others have neither children nor animals and so have remained objects of peeking and conjecture. Sometimes sitting in the garden, doing my thing while they are doing theirs, it seems like we are plastic figures placed in toy town being repositioned by a giant child. To him, mr faceless is a secret. He is intriguing because neither Josh nor I are able to describe him. If we saw him somewhere other we’d never recognise him, and we quite often have arguments about the colour of his hair. Our naked neighbours live in a flat parallel with our first floor. On weekday mornings, they iron shirts in their boxer shorts and they eat cereal in them at the weekends. I go red when I see them on the street fully clothed. They have the bodies of young gods and I’m sure that to the child in charge they’re superheroes. And me and Josh … ?
Shirley, because we spoke, dwells in the realms of bleak reality. She is a constant source of minor irritation. She claims not to play to roles with Andrew, but she has taken to them with a vigour with me. Like her marriage though, I’m sure she views our relationship as evidence to support her theories and, vexingly, I see how she could be justified. Still, there must be degrees of correctness, in the end I must know that I’m more right than she is, otherwise we’d agree.
Not that she knows we disagree. This is one of the things that most annoys me about myself.
I have no idea what Shirley was like before she became a parent, but she so entirely epitomised the last few weeks of pregnancy that I’m sure that she has taken to every stage of her life with like completeness. As soon as she became a mother to Oliver she became a mother to me, and now feels it her duty to advise me on the complicated process of love. This morning she came round to drop off Oliver and dropped off also the benefit of her experience. She said ‘No red lipstick today then?’
I said, ‘No, I didn’t like it, I could feel it on my lips. And anyway Josh told me I looked like a man in drag.’
‘Well of course he would say that,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you before, living with Josh is a terrible put-off.’
Shirley quite often begins her sentences with ‘well of course’, especially those relating to Josh. She has her own ideas about him and the reason we are friends. She is very fond of telling me that he likes me, of course, because I look like a boy. I did wonder this morning whether I was going to hear this again, but it was the red lipstick (one of her cast-offs) that had grabbed her attention. She said, ‘You know, despite the fact that men – well, most of the men that I know – say they don’t like too much, really they prefer plain girls who wear make-up to beautiful girls who don’t, because they are making an effort. Men like us to make an effort you know, otherwise they say “I see you’ve let yourself go.”’
I really hope that Shirley isn’t right. Her version of life, love, women and men is one which makes me want to let myself go. Floating. Up into the air.
Oliver has come round today because Shirley and Andrew have gone off house hunting. They are hoping to move to the north of the city where Shirley assures me that the air is cleaner. I do worry that when they move I might never see him again. He’s three. He’s the only person I have known all his life. I don’t like children, and I hope this isn’t the reason I’ve made an exception in his case. He has soft brown hair and an enquiring look. His favourite thing to do when he comes round to our house is to make rose-petal perfume from one of Shirley’s bushes that has spilled over our fence, and which Josh has trained to grow underneath his window.
Today he is sorting petals into piles according to size and shape. Each pile has twelve petals in because that’s as far as he can count. He is possessed by an intensity of concentration that I have no recollection of in myself. Maybe one day. Sitting here watching him, I am aware, as I so often am with him, that these days we have together remain in his mind for only the shortest of spaces, soon to be collated into the murky swamp that is childhood. When he moves up north, if I never see him again, how long will he remember me? And I’ll know him until I die.
I used to (and I still do sometimes, only now he doesn’t take it seriously) try to take him back as far as he could go. When he began to speak I thought, it’s not that long since he was in the womb, not that long before he was. And I’d sit him down and ask him questions, hoping he’d remember and I’d get an answer to the secret we’re all longing to tell. Sadly nothing. And now he knows what I want to hear and makes up stories. Usually involving plots Andrew has read to him the night before. Before he was born he was a pirate, he was a wrestler and, most surprisingly, he was a small blue bicycle called Bertie.
Little scrap, he only weighed five pounds when he was born. I was fascinated to watch him and work out exactly when he acquired his edges. At first, he thought the whole wide world was the same person and that person was him. Admittedly he had his favourites, but if Shirley had died, or if I had died, he wouldn’t have noticed. God needs us more than we need Him.
Oliver and I have discovered together that if you put rose petals into cold water and then boil them, the perfume is far more fragrant than if the water’s warm to start with. Also the more water the better, but boiled off to just a tiny amount and then put in the blender to mush.
I have to say that the rose-petal perfume started as a demonic joke. A couple of years ago, Josh and I were convinced it was up to us to change everyone’s opinion, especially Shirley’s. We were unreasonably irritated by her ‘being brought up without a father’ conversations, which were usually followed by trite examples of her conjugal arrangements with Andrew. ‘He and I just do the things we’re best at,’ she continues to explain, quite patiently, ‘I do the girly things and he does the manly things, but that’s because we’re good at them.’
To Shirley, ‘manly things’ means taking out the rubbish.
In the days when Oliver only weighed five pounds and we would sometimes babysit, Josh used to lean over his cot and murmur ‘Olivia! You’re so pretty!’ I doubt we’ll ever know the outcome of that experiment. The perfume was another of his ideas but the joke was lost, to the great gain of all parties, because Oliver has never gone home smelling of roses and must never have mentioned to his mother how he’s spent his afternoon. His secrecy is one of the qualities that has forced me to like him.
Today, Josh comes in just as we are decanting our brown musk into jam jars. He’s carrying a bag of clothes from the local charity shops. He’s got a red hat for me and a miniature skiing jacket for Oliver. They seem ridiculous in the heat of the summer and we laugh as we put them on. Oliver says, ‘Can we jump now?’ and we take an arm each and hurl him up into the air. We are custodians of his dizziness. We look at each other when we play this game and recognise our mutual jealousy. We wish we too could have two big people to make us feel weightless. We bought Oliver his baby-bouncer because we remembered what a sad day it was when we had to get out of ours. And the man who invented bungee jumping knows how we feel.
When Oliver leaves, I’ll pour the results of our day on the garden. It would be more cyclical perhaps to feed them to the roots of the rosebush, but they’re on the other side where I can’t get to them. Plants eat their dead ancestors. I think this as I tip our perfume away. Plants are cannibals. More than this, they eat bits of their dead selves. Horrid.
Tonight, Josh and
