Playing with the Grown-ups Read online

  He smoked with pleasure, and the musky smell fitted in, somehow, with pine and earth. He ran his finger up and down her spine.

  'Such tiny bones,' he said, 'like a little bird.'

  She did not feel tiny. She felt clumsy and awkward. He bent his head towards her. All right, God, I'll make you a deal, she thought. If I let him kiss me on the lips, but with no tongue, then technically I'm not doing anything that wrong. I didn't smoke the pot, so I am still pure.

  He kissed her.

  'No tongue,' she said frantically.

  'Shush,' he said.

  Their lips met, and it didn't feel wrong, it felt like peace. Her eyes were open and Kitty watched his face to see how he did it.

  They kissed like this for a long time, with their mouths shut, and he kissed her face, her eyes, and her temples as if she was a marvel, or some uncharted foreign land.

  'I have to go home,' she whispered. 'My mother will get worried.'

  'Don't go,' he said.

  'I have to. I'll see you tomorrow?'

  'Tomorrow. I'm going to sit here for a while and pretend you're still with me.'

  The shower rained frigid water down on her, cold enough to freeze all of her hot thoughts in their tracks, and she chanted, soap cascading in foamy mountains all over her body.

  I am cleansing away all impure thoughts; they are washing down the drain. I know you tested me, God, but I am still made of flesh, it won't happen again, I will perform any duty you ask of me, to erase spiritual dues incurred by my act of passion. Did you not wrestle with the same mortal desires? Help me, show me the way. Swami-ji, I'm sorry I have betrayed you; forgive me, I'm only a girl . . .

  'Kitty!' her mother called from the door.

  'I'm in the shower.' Did her mother not realise she was in no place to have banal conversations? Kitty was having an epic worthy awakening with a bar of rose Castile soap.

  'What?!' Kitty said.

  'Hurry up. I have to talk to you. Something has happened.'

  Her mother's eyes were dull and red.

  'We're going back to England,' she said. 'Swami-ji has seen some bad karma coming up for us here. We will only be safe from it in England. I asked him what I should do about the house because I bought it with the last bit of big money I had, but he said it didn't matter, that it was more important just to go, he would look after it. I can't work out what I did wrong. I tried so hard. He said that I'll take him with me wherever I go, but it won't be the same. What could I have done? Am I that bad?'

  Kitty looked down at her arms. They were red from scrubbing. It was me, she thought. He knew I couldn't control myself. He was saving me. He is the all-seeing; he knows what everyone is doing all of the time.

  'What time did this happen?' Kitty said in a small voice.

  'I had an audience with him two hours ago. We were looking for you. We're leaving tomorrow morning.' Her mother's forehead looked clammy, her hands shook.

  'Can I say goodbye?' Kitty asked.

  'No. He thought it would be best if we left quietly without a fuss. I'm sorry.'

  They packed throughout the night, silently, taking just their clothes. Her mother said it was best to let Nora sleep and tell her in the morning. Everything else could come later, her mother said, by ship.

  They are waiting for the train to come in, the heating covering them in smoky bursts of air.

  'When do you think it all fucked up, Kit?' Violet says.

  'Was it when we left Hay? Everything seemed fine before then, happy even. Did it all get mad when we left for New York? Do you think we were too much for Mum to cope with?'

  'I think there were problems before we left Hay, but I think that they were contained because of Bestemama and Bestepapa. I think we just remember halcyon days; I don't know that it was ever perfect. It seemed like Mummy always needed a father figure to moor her, whether it was Bestepapa, my father, a Swami-ji, God . . . so she could run off and do her thing, knowing that they were in the background to pick up the pieces. I think when Mr Fitzgerald - I can't believe I still call him that in my head! -my father died . . . I don't know, maybe then she realised that she was truly on her own. Maybe that's why we moved to the ashram - she was too proud to go back to Hay. And then, when that didn't work, because she wasn't as rich as they thought, that was when it all really went to shit, because she felt like she had nowhere else to go.'

  'I used to think it was my fault,' Violet says. 'I thought we got in the way. Do you remember when we used to sing to her? We were tiny and we used to sing to her to make her laugh? It's so surreal . . . I thought that if I was quiet and good then somehow she wouldn't be so sad.'

  'I think we all felt that. I felt that way until pretty recently. But it wasn't our fault, not really hers either.

  She was so young and ill equipped, and they didn't really know about depression. She was younger than you when she had me.' Kitty stares at Violet through the dark.

  'We're OK though, that has to be a testament to something, doesn't it?'

  'Look, there's Sam!'

  Sam lopes down the platform, in a navy pea coat. He looks like a man, Kitty thinks.

  'All right, sexy!' Violet shouts.

  Kitty begins to giggle.

  'Shut up, Violet. Kitty, how was your flight?'

  'Good, thank you, darling. How was the train?'

  'It was all right. I sat next to an old man who kept touching my leg and calling me "my boy", so I had to move. How's the Yank?'

  'Sorry he couldn't see you both; he can't miss work. They're brutal with how much time they give him off; he's a slave to the man now. I always thought I'd marry a poet, but no, I'm literally sleeping with corporate America.'

  Violet lights a cigarette and says, 'All right. We're all here now. We're allowed to go there late, irrespective of visiting hours, because I said you were flying all the way from America. Are you starving? Do you want to go home first for supper or shall we just get it over and done with and go straight to the mental ward?'

  Kitty begins to laugh hysterically at the absurd banality of the question, and Violet and Sam follow.

  They sit in the car park, rendered immobile, lapsing into calm until Sam mutters, 'Mental ward!' and they are all beset by hysteria again.

  Somewhere Violet's laughter turns into sobs.

  'It's not funny,' she says. 'I was there.'

  'I know, sweetheart,' Kitty says, rubbing her cold hands. 'I know.'

  Violet buries her face in Kitty's neck and cries.

  Chapter Seven

  We are on an adventure. We don't need things to weigh us down,' Marina told Sam and Violet, who asked her why they had to leave their toys behind. They sat in disbelieving silence, looking at her red eyes dubiously. Marina held close a small leather bag which contained her one and only wedding dress.

  They flew back to England first class because, her mother said, they were first-class people.

  'But I thought we didn't have any money,' Kitty whispered to her in the British Airways lounge.

  'I bought the tickets with air miles,' Marina said sharply. 'Please be quiet. I can't hear myself think, I've got such a headache.' She took a pill from her bag and sat back with her eyes shut. Nora sat with Torty on her lap, grim-faced. She hated flying and upset.

  It was a long day. From the airport Violet and Sam were dropped off with Nora at Peter's, whilst Kitty and her mother went straight to the accountant's office. Kitty wasn't allowed in. She sat on the squeaky leather sofa and read about sex in Cosmopolitan. Her mother's lips wobbled threateningly when she emerged, four hours later, rigid-backed. Kitty heard the accountant say, 'Well, you're just going to have to get painting.'

  In the taxi Marina whispered as she looked out of the window, 'Doesn't anyone understand? I have to be relaxed to paint. It's not a reflex.'

  She had begun to wring her hands like Lady Macbeth. Kitty didn't know whether she was meant to answer.

  A friend of her mother's, Sarah, had lent them her house in Clapham. She was in Poo
na, finding herself. It was on a street with row after row of redbrick houses that had a uniformly mean look about them.

  'I don't like this house,' Sam said.

  Her mother's lip resumed its alarming wobble.

  'Come on, Sarnbo,' Kitty said. 'It's a nice friendly house, like in The Family From One End Street.'

  Her mother turned the key. The house smelled of old parties. They all stood there.

  'Well, come on, gypsies, let's set up camp!' Elegantly stepping over mountains of bills her mother beckoned them in like Grace Kelly . . .

  'It's lovely,' Kitty said. 'I bet there's a secret passage . . .' She held out her hand. Violet took it gingerly.

  Sam remained on the doorstep in the damp darkness.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I can't come in because a sorcerer, an evil one, put a spell on this doormat and I'm stuck, glued here for eternity.'

  'Bad luck,' said her mother. 'We'll be having tea, if the spell should break.'

  'God,' she whispered to Kitty, surveying the decrepit hall. 'She could have found a bloody cleaner before she went to find herself.'

  Kitty spent a month taking the bus to a flat in Fulham where she was tutored by a Rubenesque redhead surrounded by enormous knickers that hissed as they hung from the radiators to dry. Finally, she was deemed scholarship material.

  They had two choices, her mother told her, an all-girls Catholic school in chelsea, or a 'progressive' school in North London that had boys. Her mother felt she would learn more about the world at the boy school. 'I think it will be more diverse,' she said. 'And they have a fantastic arts programme.'

  The term had already begun. Kitty didn't know anyone her age in London, and Rosaria was tucked away at Dourfield, lands away in the country, eating sugar sandwiches. Marina gave Kitty £200 and told her to get some sensible clothes that were suitable for school.

  'But where should I go?' Kitty asked her.

  'I don't know. The King's Road?'

  She decided to get some Levi Sols, white ones. The girl in the shop had great big arched eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor. Kitty asked her what size she thought she was, because she didn't know.

  'Twenty-four waist,' the girl said, as she cocked the eyebrow and carried on reading her magazine.

  Kitty got so nervous in the changing room that she bit her thumbnail to the quick and she realised when she put the jeans on that they were speckled with her blood like rust. The jeans were too short.

  'I'll take these,' Kitty said, handing her the jeans, which she'd folded up.

  The woman unfolded them. She took in the red smearing their snowy perfection.

  'How disgusting,' she said. 'Forty pounds.'

  Kitty decided good underwear and hair were more important than clothes anyway. She took a taxi to Beau-champ Place and bought a silk bra and knickers for £97.50. The bra, a 32B, was a good investment for her future life of romance, she felt.

  She walked into a hairdresser's called Bardots. An Irish man with sparkling eyes called Callum asked her what she wanted.

  'Highlights?' Kitty said, confused.

  'Wicked,' he said. 'You'd make a great blonde, really bring out your eyes. The mousy look is not for you.'

  Two hours later, with a stinging scalp, she emerged with swinging hair the colour of treacle. A man getting out of a cab gave her a searing grown-up look. Kitty looked away, and turned to look back. He was still looking.

  'Hi,' he called.

  'Hello,' she said.

  'Would you like to join me for a drink? In that pub?' He was flushed like a boy.

  'I'm sorry but I can't. I have to go home,' she said.

  'Can I have your phone number?'

  She didn't want to be rude to him. He looked fragile somehow. She gave him the number and ran off into the dark, smoky afternoon to catch her bus, back to the safety of Clapham Junction.

  Nora and her mother were in the kitchen drinking tea and looking secretive when she walked in.

  'Good afternoon, fair gentlewomen of the south,' Kitty said, afraid that her mother might be angry with her wanton purchasing.

  'My darling heart,' she said. 'Please tell me that there are lots of nice sensible jumpers hidden artfully in that Janet Reger bag.'

  'No, there aren't. Sorry.' Kitty tried to look winning beneath waves of treacle. 'The woman in the shop was mean to me, and I bled on the jeans, so I had to buy them, and I didn't feel like shopping after that.'

  Her mother smiled a bit sadly.

  'Oh Kitten. You look like jailbait.'

  'Thank you,' Kitty said. 'Also, I did a stupid thing. I gave a man my phone number on the street because I was embarrassed, and I didn't know what to do, so if he rings could you tell him I don't live here?'

  Nora gave Kitty her doom look, and said gloomily, 'Oh, you're not your mother's daughter for nothing.'

  And at this her mother laughed for the first time in weeks.

  Kitty wore her new too-short white jeans to school, with a Vivienne Westwood cardigan that she took from Sarah-in-Poona's wardrobe.

  Nora caught her, as usual.

  'That doesn't belong to you,' she said.

  'Well, she left it. I mean she's not going to need it, she wears saris now.' Kitty buttoned it around her tightly, and crossed her arms.

  Violet screeched from upstairs.

  'Nora, I don't want this uniform, it's disgusting. Where are my pink leggings?'

  'See what you've done? Jaysus help me. I give up.' She spun out of the room like an angry wasp.

  Kitty found some pale-pink suede boots with a vicious stiletto heel and put them on. She wobbled down the stairs before her mother saw her and fettered the outfit entirely.

  'Goodbye, Mummy,' she sang up the stairs.

  'I'll pick you up, OK? We can have tea at the Savoy for a treat,' her mother called drowsily from her bedroom. 'I love you,' she added.

  Her school was perched at the top of a hill in Islington, its Gothic spires twisting up to the sky, as though it were waving to God.

  At this school if you were a girl you were either a beck or a hippy, or you were just hard. If you weren't hard, a beck or a hippy, you were a loser and that's all there was to it, she realised. The becks wore jeans, much longer than hers, with tight bodysuits and bomber jackets from French Connection. They had poker-straight hair and Tiffany necklaces. They shopped on Hampstead High Street. They smelled sweet and powdery, like Narcisse by Chloé or Tresor. The hippies wore vintage faded cords and rainbow sweaters and Doc Martens boots. Every Saturday they went to Camden Market and bought bootleg Dylan tapes. They were in love with Alex James from Blur, with his long swinging hair and downcast eyes.

  The becks didn't go to clubs, they 'went round people's houses' and watched the boys get stoned. The hippies went to gigs and stage-dived, they were long and pale and vegan, the object of derision for the raggamuffin boys who moved down the halls, Walkmans on, bouncing to the beat of their drum and base music. Kitty didn't understand most of the things the raggas said. Every sentence was followed by 'innit'. Like a question. 'Your jeans are too short, innit?'

  Kitty was neither a beck nor a hippy. Her hoop earrings were too small to be hard, and she didn't have a Stussy jacket. She was too tall and blonde to be a loser. The boys decided Kitty was a substitute teacher.

  'Oi, Miss! You're really tall, innit? Where do you live? Miss, have you got a boyfriend? Who are you dealing with?'

  Honor Freeman was the exception. She was neither a beck nor a hippy, and she became Kitty's best friend. She had skin that was white like the moon, and eyebrows like a silent-movie star's that just grew that way. She had the cleanest fingernails Kitty had ever seen.

  Honor was friends with everyone.

  Kitty wanted Honor's family to adopt her. They were all so nice and sensible. They lived in a mock Tudor house in Highbury, and they couldn't understand why her mother had sent her to school so far away from where she lived. They thought it wasn't responsible.

  'Oh Kitty, you must get so TIRED, you
poor lamb. That awful journey from Clapham . . . You can come and stay the night with us whenever you like.' Honor's mum Ruth gave her a look of sorrow. Kitty smiled bravely at her, trying her best to look tired and woebegone.

  'We'll get some meat on your scrawny goy bones,' Honor's dad, Roy, said, passing her a huge slab of challah bread dripping with plum jam from their garden. Kitty was happy to be called scrawny.

  Everything about Honor was lovely. She sang in the school music group and her voice was sweet and otherworldly. The girls at Kitty's other schools had always hero-worshipped Kitty's mother and couldn't wait to spend the night at her house, but her mother's swearing and eccentric friends made Honor nervous, and she always had piano lessons or Amnesty International when Kitty asked her to stay for the weekend.

  'Why can't Honor come here?' her mother said crossly, as Kitty set off to the tube station with her backpack yet another Saturday morning.

  'She can't. It's Ruth and Roy's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They're having a drinks party and we're going to be the waitresses.' She shrugged.

  'Well, bully for Ruth and Roy.' Marina gave Kitty a black look. 'We're your family, and SOME people would feel very lucky to have such a fun young mother.'

  'It's got nothing to do with that,' Kitty said. 'I just do different things there.'

  'What sort of different things?' Her mother looked miserable, and she felt guilty.

  'Nothing really. They're so nice. You'd like them.' Kitty knew this was probably untrue. She imagined her mother in Ruth's pristine kitchen and knew that they would hate each other.

  'Well, have fun in suburbia.' Her mother waved, and Kitty left bolstered by a blithe creeping power from her upset.

  'Can I use the phone?' Kitty asked Ruth.

  'Yes dear, do you need to call your mum?'

  'My grandmother. I won't be long. I need to tell her something.'

  'Bestemama? Guess who?'

  'Kitty? Darling! Ingrid told me you were back - she spoke to Mummy briefly. I'm so happy that you're in England. Are you all right?'