‘How come he had that wallpaper?’ Raphael immediately asks. ‘You’d never in a zillion years let me have wallpaper like that.’
‘You don’t support Spurs,’ Chloë points out with acid speed.
‘No – shut up, Chloë – I mean Liverpool wallpaper. And anyway I’m thinking of changing teams. Daddy says I ought to support a London club and Alex supports Tottenham.’
‘I painted that wallpaper over when I was pregnant with Jake,’ I tell them wistfully.
‘I wish you hadn’t,’ says Raph, ‘I might have supported Spurs right from the start if you hadn’t.’
Jake looks at the photo and shrugs.
‘Guess how old he is now.’ I say.
‘Dunno. My age?’
‘He’s thirty.’
Raphael takes a breath. ‘Thirty years old! A whole man! But that photo doesn’t look like the olden days.’
‘It’s not, it’s about twenty years ago.’
‘Were you alive then?’
‘Come on, Raph, you know I was. Twenty years ago isn’t that long. I was at university.’
‘It’s funny,’ says Chloë, ‘to think that you were at university when that boy was sleeping in Jake’s room.’
‘Except it wasn’t Jake’s room then,’ I remind her, ‘it was That Boy’s room.’
‘Hmm. I don’t like him,’ Raph says.
‘You don’t know anything about him.’
‘I do! He supports Spurs.’
‘Yes, OK, you do know that about him. But he may not support them any more.’
‘Maybe now he’s switched to Liverpool,’ Jake suggests.
‘Or maybe he’s gone off football altogether.’
Chloë laughs, a cackle designed to get at Raph.
‘You don’t go off it,’ Raph says firmly. ‘Not if you love it when you are a child.’
In an attempt to switch this gruesomely one-track conversation, I show the kids the other photos but they’re less impressed. It’s the wallpaper that gets to them. The hard physical evidence of another child getting to inflict his taste, his interests, on the walls of the house that, as far as they’re concerned, is theirs and always has been and always will be.
But it won’t. Everything changes, everything goes. The fireplaces are gone, the walls are repainted, the cake eaten, the snow melted, the babies grown. Theirs and ours. And others after us.
From: Leon Pidgeon
To: Julie Myerson
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2003 11:53 AM
Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road
Hi Julie
I am the son of John Pidgeon, who you interviewed last weekend about living at 34 Lillieshall Road. He mentioned to me that you may be interested in getting in touch with me.
If this is the case then you can email me back at this address.
Leon
My first conscious memory of being alive and somewhere. Sitting in bright warm light. Under me is softness, above is warmth, dazzling warmth.
My bottom is on the ground but my arms are moving. In my hands is something light and easy, something very interesting to me – there are colours in it, maybe the curves and dots of a smile. I lift it up higher, higher, then let it come jerking down. When it moves, the rest of me moves. I am so alert to that thing in my hands and I am squeaky, I am exhilarated. I am a baby on a sunlit patch of carpet, holding a toy.
‘Olive Oyl!’ my Mum said recently when I mentioned this memory. ‘You had an Olive Oyl doll at Gresham Gardens. A bendy rubber thing. But we left that house when you were a year old, darling. You can’t possibly remember anything about being there.’
But I can.
In my family, I am the funny one – the one who remembers things she can’t possibly remember, has sudden thoughts that go nowhere, asks too many questions, worries unnecessarily. Funny old Julie – the jumpy, difficult, strange one.
‘you can’t possibly remember anything about being there’
After Gresham Gardens, we move to another house just around the corner – The Chalet, 2 Middlebeck Avenue, Mapperley Plains, Nottingham. Now I am two years old and I have short fair hair with a red gingham ribbon tied in a bow but I am not sweet, I am sitting crossly on the little landing halfway up the stairs – behind me a window, with black metal and white paintwork – new and clean and glossy.
My tights are black and they itch me. I spend most of the time on my knees, though sometimes I come downstairs on my bottom as it feels safer. Don’t want to fall. I am an anxious child.
The hall down below me has black and white lino tiles, which Mummy polishes with a strange whirring machine called a Goblin that has an actual goblin on the front. I like to sit and run my fingers over the little red creature, enjoying its raised-up feel, the hard plastic still buzzy and warm from being used.
I follow Mummy around as she does the housework. She says I am like a little dog. When my baby sister Mandy’s awake, she’s screaming or feeding and Mummy’s busy, but when she goes down for a rest Mummy and I are pals in those afternoons of furniture polish and doll’s clothes and prickly roses and the wet exciting smell of the paddling pool on the concrete patio, filled by a dark green hose on a hot day.
I have ideas. Sometimes these ideas make me tremble with excitement. I am four now and I sit in my place on the landing and make a Big Girl Box for Mandy who’s getting bigger, even though she can’t talk or do anything yet. In the shoebox, there will be: a crayon (not a wax one, which is only for babies), a rubber to rub things out, some paper, and one of Mummy’s old pinkish lipsticks with its sugary, big-lady smell.
I rub a bit of it on Mandy and she laughs and I see that her nappy has got so fat that wet is coming down her leg. I show her how to scribble all over the paper like a grown-up. She won’t so I try to make her but in the end she gets tired and crawls away and I shout at her to come back right now! – but she won’t. It’s tempting to hit her but I know that if I do she’ll scream and then I’ll have a smack bottom.
‘she can’t talk or do anything yet’
The dress I am wearing has no front or back fastenings and every time Mummy pulls it on or off me, I almost suffocate. If you can’t breathe, then you die. Every morning our goldfish, Tish and Tosh, throw themselves out of the bowl and Daddy nearly steps on them when he goes down to make the tea. But he always puts them back in and they gasp back to life and swim off. Until one day he puts them back in and they just float. ‘Too late,’ he says. ‘Sorry Tish, sorry Tosh, you’ve had it this time.’ He sounds sad but you can tell from his face that he thinks it’s funny.
Another day – by now I have two sisters – we are sitting in our wicker chairs in the playroom watching Robin Hood on TV and smoke snakes silently in through the door behind us. I begin to scream.
‘The house is burning down!’
Mandy stamps and wails. Only Debbie dares run and find Mummy,