And with that I felt my past transform slightly, as if a part of it had been scrubbed clean.
Josephine turned to Mum and Dad and said ‘Tell us about Rachel, in general terms.’
Mum and Dad exchanged doubtful looks.
‘Anything at all,’ she said cheerily. ‘Everything helps us to get to know her better. Tell us about her good points.’
‘Good points?’ Mum and Dad were startled.
‘Yes,’ encouraged Josephine. ‘Like, is she clever?’
‘Ah no,’ Dad laughed. ‘Claire’s the clever one, she has a degree in English, you know.’
And Margaret’s not bad, either,’ Mum chipped in. ‘She hasn’t a degree, but I’d say if she’d gone to college, she’d have done well.’
‘That’s right,’ Dad turned to Mum. ‘She was such a good worker, that even though she wasn’t as bright as Claire, she’d have probably made the grade.’
Mum nodded conversationally. ‘Although she’s done very well for herself without a degree, she has a load of responsibility in that job, more than some of the people who have degrees…’
Josephine loudly cleared her throat.
‘Rachel.’ She smiled graciously. ‘That’s who we’re discussing.’
‘Ah, right.’ They nodded.
Josephine waited in silence until Dad blurted out, ‘Average, Rachel’s average. No eejit, but no rocket scientist either.
‘Hahaha,’ he added, half-heartedly.
‘So what are her good points?’ Josephine pressed.
Mum and Dad turned to each other, looked perplexed, shrugged and remained silent. I could sense the other inmates shift uncomfortably and I cringed. Why wouldn’t my fucking parents make something up and spare me this shame?
‘Was she popular with boys?’ Josephine asked.
‘No,’ said Mum, definitively.
‘You sound very sure?’
‘It was her height, you see,’ Mum explained. ‘She was too tall for most of the lads her own age. I’d say she had a complex about it.
‘It’s hard for tall girls to land boyfriends,’ she explained.
I watched Josephine look very pointedly at the top of my mother’s head, then at the top of my father’s head, a couple of inches lower. A gesture that was completely lost on Mum.
‘But I suppose apart from her height, she can look attractive sometimes,’ Mum added half-heartedly. She didn’t believe a word of it. Neither did Dad because he interjected ‘No, Helen and Anna are the good-looking ones of the family.
‘Although…’ he added jovially.
Say I am too, I begged silently. Say I am, too.
‘… the pair of them are such minxes,’ he continued, ‘especially Helen, that you’d wonder why anyone bothers with either of them. They’d have you driven mad!’
He seemed to expect a burst of sympathetic laughter, but his words fell on silence. The other inmates were staring at their feet and I wished I was anywhere in the world other than that room. A Turkish jail would have been nice.
The time dragged by so slowly.
‘She can sing,’ Dad blurted, into the mortified quiet.
‘No, she can’t,’ Mum muttered, giving him a shut-the-fuck-up look. ‘That was a mistake.’
Naturally Josephine was all ears. So they had to tell her about the Saturday afternoon when I was seven and we were having a new kitchen fitted. The old one had been ripped out and, because I had no one to play with, I sat there on my own. In the absence of anything else to do, I sang songs. (‘Seasons in the Sun’, ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ and other favourites of long car journeys.) Mum, who was upstairs in bed with the flu, heard me. And the combination of her delirium and the effect the empty, echoey kitchen had on my youthful voice – turning it into something high and clear and tuneful – convinced her she had a fledgling opera singer for a daughter.
Less than a week later, in a mood of high anticipation, I was despatched to a private singing coach. Who did her best with me for a couple of lessons until she felt she really couldn’t swizz my parents any longer by taking their money under false pretences. ‘It might work if all her singing could be done in kitchens that are being redecorated,’ she explained to my outraged mother. ‘But I’m not sure that could be guaranteed.’
Mum never forgave me. She seemed to think I’d deliberately conned her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t sing?’ she’d hissed at me. ‘Think of the money we’ve wasted.’
‘I did tell you,’ I protested.
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘You didn’t.’
Then I stopped defending myself because I felt guilty about misleading them. While I had suspected that the whole thing was a big mistake, I had undeniably got caught up in the general thrill of it all. I had longed to be talented and special.
How I wished Dad hadn’t brought it up.
Then, because there seemed to be nothing else to say, Josephine ended the session.
That night I began packing my bag. Not that I had ever unpacked it properly. It was still thrown on the floor by the side of my bed, tights and skirts and shoes and jeans all tangled higgledy-piggledy in it.
‘Going somewhere?’ Chaquie shouted at me, as I took my good jacket out of the wardrobe and threw it into the bag.
Like Neil, Chaquie had lost the run of herself entirely since she’d admitted she was an alcoholic. She rivalled Neil as the narkiest inmate in the Cloisters. She shouted and screeched at everyone and everybody, especially her old buddy, God. ‘Why did you make me a fucking alcoholic?’ she regularly shrieked, looking heavenward. ‘Why me?’
Josephine kept assuring her that her anger was perfectly normal. That it was all part of the process. Which was scant comfort to me who had to share a room with Chaquie and got yelled at constantly.
‘The three weeks that I’m legally bound to stay for are up on Friday,’ I explained nervously to her.
‘I’d planned to escape at the end of my first three weeks too,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘But then they brought in that fucker I’m married to and opened up the whole can of worms. Next they threatened me with an injunction and now I have to stay for the duration.’
‘Ah well,’ I said awkwardly.