Читать книгу Not My Idea of Heaven - Lindsey Rosa - Страница 9

Chapter Four

The Carpenter, the Dreamer, the Romantic and Me

When I was little, I shared a room with my sisters, Alice and Samantha. Our beds were lined up side by side, mine being the small one in the middle. There was just enough room to squeeze between them, but I didn’t mind that it was cramped: I felt safe, flanked by my two big sisters. No bogeymen would come and get me in the night.

Our room had a very posh-looking set of fitted wardrobes covering one wall, but in the middle there was a recess to accommodate a little dressing table and its mirror. It was there that Alice sat to prepare herself for bed every night, but Samantha and I were rarely awake to see her. Being older, she attended the evening meetings, and Samantha and I had usually fallen asleep by the time she returned home.

One evening I awoke and saw her, lit by the little pull-string light above the dressing table, peering intently at herself in the mirror. I spied on her from beneath my blankets, hoping she wouldn’t notice me. She was talking to herself gently, slowly plaiting her long hair. I watched her carefully secure two plaits with hair bands. Then came the part I remember most clearly. She opened the dressing table drawer and took out several curlers. These were not the old-fashioned tubes, but plastic clasps, covered in foam. Taking the tassel of hair that hung below her hair bands, she wrapped it around the curlers and fastened them. I shivered with excitement. How daring my big sister was! We were not supposed to try to make ourselves look pretty in any way. I wondered how she managed to sleep with those hard lumps on her pillow, but I guessed it must be worth it.

Alice really wanted to look her best because she was madly in love. She had met the man of her dreams – another Fellowship member. They had eyed each other during meetings, and, despite the seating plan, a Fellowship courtship had ensued. As far as anyone knew, Alice and Mike had never kissed or as much as held hands, but they did speak on the telephone. They spent hours talking each evening.

Young adults in the Fellowship typically met future spouses during a special three-day meeting that could take place in any country where Fellowship disciples were found. The Fellowship made no secret of the purpose of these events, which were a unique opportunity to widen the gene pool. Fellowship women were required to follow their husbands, which meant that as a woman you could end up living almost anywhere in the world. In Alice’s case, she struck it lucky: her beau lived just around the corner!

Alice was so busy with her love affair that she failed to notice that everyone else her age was doing their GCE O-Levels and ended up leaving school with barely any qualifications. As it happens, this wasn’t much of a problem.

Fellowship women were not expected to have careers, just a short stint working in a local office, as Alice did, and then on with the business of marriage. Their job was to reproduce and look after the household. The men were encouraged to gain skills as apprentices at Fellowship firms. University was out of the question, as it was seen as a place where subversive ideas circulated.

The biggest ambition we were expected to have was to get into Heaven. That was the dream.

If Alice was the romantic, Samantha was the dreamer. Actually, she was a romantic too. I can’t say how she got on at school, being six years younger than she was, but academia was never her strong point. Still, if there was a qualification for fantasizing about romance and other lives, she’d probably score even better than I would.

I can only assume that Samantha’s teachers gave her a hard time for doing badly in class, because that is what she gave me when we played teachers and pupils in one of our favourite games. Well, it didn’t remain one of my favourites for very long, but she certainly liked it. It always seemed to revolve around her telling me off, saying I hadn’t done my maths properly. Samantha’s persona took the form of an extremely strict teacher who frequently made me cry. I was an easy target, of course – I hadn’t even started school yet!

When we played shops, we’d take tins out of Mum’s kitchen cupboards, and tubes of toothpaste from the bathroom, balancing all of our stock on top of a wicker linen basket. It lived on the landing at the top of the stairs, where it was ideally placed for receiving reluctant customers on their way to the toilet. On top of the basket we’d place a plastic till, which we were both desperate to operate. Whoever got to the shower cap first could transform themselves into the shopkeeper by pulling it over their head. This shop uniform made us feel very professional!

Samantha and I didn’t play together for as many years as I’d have liked, simply because she was six years older than I, and soon tired of my childish antics. But what really brought the whole thing to a premature end was something I did to her, which I still feel bad about even now. I stole her only worldly friend away from her. Natalie had been a lifeline for Samantha, connecting her to the world outside of the Fellowship. For many of us, those links kept us sane. I think it broke her heart, and I don’t think she ever forgave me for that.

From then on, I felt as if I were the only child in the house. While she became more reserved, I busied myself with my worldly friends. My brother and sisters were growing up fast, but I still had a lot of playing to do.

There’s a lot I don’t know about my brother, Victor. He’d spent twelve years finding his feet in the male-dominated world of the Fellowship even before I was born. He was two years old when the Fellowship split into opposing subgroups, Mum and Dad ending up in the more extreme of the two, and my mum’s parents totally cut off from us in the other. Victor lived through all that, growing up in the 1970s. I know it all affected him greatly, but it didn’t stop him loving and treating me like his baby. And those twelve years that separated us might as well have been twelve minutes for all the difference they made to our relationship.

I really loved my big brother. I followed him everywhere and couldn’t wait for him to wake up in the morning. I listened out for his call for me as soon as his alarm went off and delighted in acting as his slave. On request, I brought him cups of coffee and ferried messages back and forth between him and Mum. She was much too busy to bother about my brother when he was lazing in bed, but that was OK by me.

I loved it when Victor helped me with projects. One time I designed a set of heart-shaped shelves, which he assisted me in making. Whatever I wanted, he’d find a way of incorporating it into his own woodwork projects during his apprenticeship as a carpenter. As was usual practice in the Fellowship, he left school at sixteen, skipping his A-levels and learning a practical trade.

Victor was really handy with a can of paint, and sometimes Dad entrusted him with it to touch up the rusty spots on his Fiat Panorama. Dad didn’t believe in spending money on new cars until he had run his current one into the ground. By the time he had finished with it, the bodywork would be more Polyfilla than metal. The Panorama was an estate car, which carted the six of us around, four in the front and two in the luggage compartment, hanging on for dear life. I was rather glad when the law for wearing seat belts in the backs of cars was enforced a few years later.

Victor may have been handy with a spray can, but he couldn’t really be trusted with one. It always started off all right, then, having finished the job in hand, he looked round for more things to spray. On this particular occasion it was my tricycle that he turned to. I loved that little trike and whizzed around at top speed on it, leaning around the corners with one wheel off the ground. One day I dashed into the garage to grab it and, on seeing it, burst into floods of tears. Across the front of this dear little red trike was a spray mark of blue paint. It wasn’t a big mark, about the size of my four-year-old palm, but to me the blemish was the end of the world. I had no doubt in my mind who was responsible for this horrible stain.

‘Victor,’ I howled, ‘look what you’ve done!’

He popped his head out of the shed, a sheepish look on his face. ‘Sorry, Lindsey,’ he grinned. My anguish drained away at the sight of him, and immediately I forgave him. But I could never ride that tricycle again with quite the same pride. I got used to Victor’s destructiveness, though. I had to. He didn’t think twice about cutting my doll’s hair, and once even found he had crushed some of my toy cars in the vice that lived in the shed. He claimed they had been in a car crash.

When I was about nine, I asked Victor to take me out. What I really wanted was for him to take me fishing with him. He regarded me with a funny look on his face and said he wasn’t sure. I realized then that he was embarrassed by me. I wore clothes that didn’t fit in with the other girls my age and he clearly minded this detail. I was hurt by his embarrassment, and never asked him again. As I grew older, our relationship changed, and for a time we grew apart, but eventually events would bring us closer together again.