Two memories of that day we looked round the house by the canal and signed the contracts: Standing on the black iron bridge spanning the canal, staring into the sheets of brown water, wondering if I could stick her for a full year. Next to me she was in four-inch platforms, rocking on the wooden slats, draped in black net. We were waiting for the landlord to arrive from Leicester. We really needed this house. I was being thrown out of my old house the next day, and Emma’s friends had let it be known that they weren’t into having her in theirs, either. Until the previous week I had been going to look at this place with a boy. But there had been a scene, a skirmish, a deconciliation. As a consequence he dyed his hair red, I stopped reading his poems, and we both made alternative arrangements. My alternative now tilted her wide-browed, triangular face towards me, pouted and purred, ‘I think that’s him there, with the carrier bag. He’s a dwarf, look.’
In those platforms she walked like a camel’s front half. Her leggings were beige, to exaggerate the effect. It meant that she reeled helplessly and harmfully through the narrow passages and pasteboard rooms of the empty house. By the time she hit the biggest room, at the top, she reined herself giddily in and declared that we would both be taking it.
The dwarf and I exchanged a mild glance. These middle-class girls knew how to get what they wanted.
My second memory is of turning the mattress in the biggest room. It had been designated mine, since it had a double bed and, as Emma hissed at me while we examined the bathroom in the extension out back, I was sexually active while she most certainly wasn’t. Then, without turning a hair, she raised her voice to ask the dwarf if he minded Blu-Tack on the flock?
So in the biggest room the landlord suggested we turn the mattress. I don’t know why, really; we were checking the furnishings, testing the inventory of bits and bobs. The wardrobe door had just creaked and sidled itself off its hinges, banging against the wall, so I think he was out to distract my attention. When we looked at the mattress either side, he sadly surveyed the stains and clicked his tongue. The last resident was a lady,’ he apologised, taking us both for men of the world. Then he explained that she had been on medication, and that was why the wardrobe was broken. The lady routinely flung herself at the furnishings.
We had a kitchen window which stared straight out onto the bridge and we could watch people coming back from town. As the first few weeks went by I laid a neat row of emptied green bottles along that sill, then across each scrupulously wiped surface, the top of each dusted cupboard, and around the skirting boards. I had Pre-Raphaelite postcards stuck to each kitchen cupboard door, and my ghetto blaster permanently by the draining board, belting out Liza Minnelli’s greatest and Philip Glass’s Low Symphony morning, noon and night. It was fabulous.
The overspill of paperbacks from my room and the living room appeared in tall piles on top of the telly (whose tube had already blown) in the kitchen’s corner where the stairs ended. I worried sometimes about the pages being impregnated and warped by the cooking fumes, but, since each book was a slim volume of something or other anyway, decided it wasn’t a problem.
There were a lot of fumes, though. Each bottle in those careful rows represented a meal cooked at some elaborate length by me. Since I taught at irregular hours, I would often start cooking at two in the afternoon and dinner became an increasingly baroque affair. I set myself into a pattern of cracking open the latest Bulgarian red and plunging into the first glass as the oil began to shimmer and boil in our wok. The glasses were a moving-in present from a very dear friend so, I reasoned, it was a waste not to keep them in almost constant use. I had lovely teatimes stirring the wok with a fag in hand, Liza shrieking out ‘Maybe Next Time’ again and again.
Emma eventually pissed me off because when it came to her nights to cook she did some terrible things. Rehearsals went on late or, when they ended on time, they had drained her too much. She produced chicken casseroles for which the contents were tipped altogether into one dirty pan and allowed to broil till they emerged in a grey broth thickened only with splinters of bone.
And the washing-up! On went the Marigolds, but for Emma, washing up meant turning on the cold tap and dangling each item under the flow for a few seconds, then tossing it willy-nilly into the nearest cupboard. Looking in the cupboards later was just distressing. Slimy wet plates and saucepans still caked in grease, scabbed in sauces and rinds of dead pasta.
This was the girl, the eldest of the many offspring of her house, who had had to take charge of the housework in holidays. Her father was a stern Indian Catholic who knew where he wanted his daughters to be. And that was in the kitchen, by the playpen with his youngest son, while his
