‘Is that Alvin Reynolds?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You don’t know me, I’m so sorry to bother you … it’s just that I’m writing a book about our house in Clapham and I think you used to live here.’
‘Not interested, sorry.’
He puts the phone down.
The weather has broken, much cooler, rain all night. Walk down the wet pavements to see Jo Bowyer, my osteopath, who’s been treating my spinal scoliosis for years. Jo is not only a fencing champion, but also a member of the Bowyer family who owned most of this patch of Clapham for centuries.
Jo grew up in the Pink House – it seems to have no other address, marooned as it is right in the middle of our back-to-back gardens – but now she lives out in the country with her small daughter, husband, and a pack of hunting hounds.
Jo – who has frizzy blonde hair, an intriguingly aristocratic manner, and wears a leather biker’s jacket over her whites – is the only person I know who can say ‘hot bitch’ with a completely straight face. It always feels somehow exotic to lie on her white towelling table in Clapham and hear tales of dead livestock and kennel maids, country schools and fetes.
Today Jo says that my back feels different from usual.
‘I can feel a lot of old, deep stuff from long ago.’
‘How do you mean? How long ago?’
She hesitates, her hands under me. ‘I would say, the late sixties. Mid to late sixties.’
‘You can really pinpoint it to within a few years like that?’
If anyone else tried to tell me this, I’d laugh. But Jo isn’t like that. She’s honest, no-nonsense, even abrupt at times. If she has nothing to say, she says nothing. Which means that when she does say something I believe her.
‘I’m good at putting ages on things,’ she tells me flatly. ‘I would say this is 1966/67. What was going on in your life then?’
‘You mean did I have any accidents?’
‘It can be anything – accidents, illness, emotional stress, whatever.’
I tell her – truthfully – that my childhood before my mother left my father (when I was twelve) was really very happy, very settled. They started fighting about two years before she left, so I suppose from 1970 onwards I may have had a tougher time, though I don’t especially remember it like that.
‘No,’ she says, ‘this is earlier. How old were you in 1968?’
Eight. I was eight.
I am small, skinny, nervy, wearing corduroy, reading Blyton and Nesbit, hating gym, frightened of the dark, of wolves, of the taste and texture of toothpaste. Frightened of everything, in fact. At school I am so shy I spend each playtime facing the wall in the corner of the playground, gazing at the velvety moss landscape and picking at the crumbly sandstone with my fingernails, hoping no one will speak to me.
We live close to school in a bungalow designed by my mother. There’s a swing and a tree house and fairies who live in the bluebells at the shady bottom of the garden, and something my father has always dreamed of having – an indoor swimming pool.
‘There was one thing,’ I tell Jo. ‘We had a swimming pool in our house – just a small one – but I was absolutely petrified of water.’
‘Oh?’
I tell her about my daily dread – that we were all supposed to have a swim after school. My sisters couldn’t wait to have their armbands blown up and jump straight in, but just the feel of the armbands inflating terrified me. I used to stand in a corner and tremble and cry.
‘I thought I would drown,’ I tell Jo. ‘I didn’t think I’d float.’
‘I didn’t think I’d float’
She asks me if they ever forced me in. I tell her 1 don’t think so, they were very patient.
‘I think it was me. I was very difficult,’ I tell her, and I laugh then because I remember other things.
‘What?’
I explain to her how, in the same bungalow, my father had a workshop full of chemicals to do with his work (he had a small, two-man plastics factory) and that he once put some polystyrene in a beaker and let it set. Later I tiptoed into his workshop and secretly licked it because it looked exactly like the froth on beer. He then mentioned to me that it was poisonous and I didn’t dare tell him I’d licked it, but I was convinced I was going to die.
‘What did you do?’ Jo asks me.
‘I went and sat in the garden with my dog and waited to die.’
After the session, I drive Chloë to tennis practice and we discuss the way fear can affect your body.
‘I used to be very scared of the shower,’ she tells me, ‘but I don’t give it any thought now.’
‘Hey, I remember that. You used to scream and scream.’
She giggles at the memory.
‘And then one day you just didn’t.’
‘Mmm, I suppose.’
‘But do you feel we helped you? Or did we make it worse? Did we used to get cross with you?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she admits happily.
I still remember every moment of the indoor swimming pool. The sunshine wavering over the bright blue water and making juddery patterns on the turquoise tiles. The ominous odour of chlorine, the white ledge you clung to, the decorative dried starfish on the wall – an emblem of terror for years afterwards.
I turn right down Nightingale Lane and ask Chloë how she got over it, the fear of the shower. Does she remember?
‘I suppose I just realized it wasn’t very rational,’ she says, inspecting a scab on her knee.
Doreen Webley is a couple of years younger than me, gentle, quiet, neatly dressed in white shirt and long denim skirt. She comes through the hall and says she doesn’t remember it being so narrow. I apologize for all the boxes piled by the door.
‘It might be that or it might just be that I’ve got that bit wider,’ she laughs.
We sit and drink tea at the kitchen table. She talks quietly, haltingly, but she offers information without my having to ask questions. I’m impressed by her directness. In the end I put my pencil down and just listen.
‘I came in the summer of seventy-eight. I was sixteen. I didn’t know my Mum at all – she’d left me in Jamaica when I was two and I hadn’t seen her since. I’d been pushed from relation to relation over there, but the aunt I was living with got fed up with me and decided it was time my Mum had me back. So I was sent over here. I’d been in the middle of O levels in Jamaica so I had to try and find somewhere to carry on. My Mum couldn’t get me into school anywhere so I enrolled at Vauxhall College and managed to get a few passes.’
I ask her what her Mum was like to live with and she gazes down at her tea. ‘To be honest, we didn’t have a very good relationship. I think she resented me being here.’
‘And your Dad?’
‘He lived nearby. But I didn’t meet him at all till I was eighteen. He was OK, his