The Pink House at Appleton Read Online Free PDF

the pink core of him where feelings lived, he came into himself. During the evenings, at sunset, when he sat in the chintz armchair listening to the Mullard radio deep in arias and fugues and adagios and burst into quiet tears, he knew it would always be thus. Sometimes he was scared with the enormity of feeling, of not knowing, unable to find expression, drowning in melancholia.
    â€˜Miss Mama?’ he remembered Aunt Enid saying.
    Mama had two sisters, Aunt Amanda and Aunt Enid. Aunt Enid had the lemonade voice, frangipani scent and warm caresses. She was unmarried and without children, and loved Boyd. She exuded everything good. He had spent a week at her Kingston house where the garden was lush and a hammock hung from a St Julian mango tree. The days were nectar days and the sun like honey. The mango scents weakened his senses and Aunt Enid came to him in the warm afternoon in the garden, sat with him in the hammock so that they could look back at the house in the background and hear nothing. Her breasts were like soft toffee. He lapped at her and ate her and was smothered by her. And she took him to her without words. They were together in the silence. And there was no aching because there was no anguish. It was the first time he had been away from Mama and Papa. He was six years old.
    â€˜Miss Mama? Miss Papa?’
    He smiled at her. She smiled back. She knew. And she stroked the soft part under his chin till he hung his head. He was in paradise, full of secret knowledge, in the music place where words were unnecessary. They slept together in the garden heat in the shade of the mango tree, and were only awakened towards evening by the maid, ringing the bell frantically for dinner.
    * * *
    Mrs Moore visited Mama almost every day during those first weeks at Appleton. She was a lonely woman, Papa said. All her cheerfulness and outward confidence was just a sham. But that meant nothing to Mama. Mrs Moore was a fresh breeze, a happy tune, the therapy she needed. At about ten o’clock each day the front door opened and in walked Mrs Moore, wearing her fruit-encrusted, camel-coloured felt hat and her spicy-camphor perfume. Under the drawing room window in the overgrown garden, Boyd heard the tinkle of cups, the clink of silver cake knives (Mama’s wedding present from her father), the gushing conversation, Mrs Moore’s jolly laughter and Mama’s happy, girlish giggles. He heard the Mullard radio say ‘“Passing Strangers,” by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.’ And the beat of his heart quickened because he heard the voices whisper the name of the girl who was coming soon, the girl whose lips were lollipop-red,
Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi.

CHAPTER 3

    Pepsi arrived at the beginning of the half term holidays. Her lips were lollipop-red, just as Boyd knew they would be, and black coils of hair sprouted about her head in magnificent profusion. She spoke about Mr and Mrs Moore as her “Abuelo” and her “Abuela”, and about her school, Excelsior, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingston, where she was in the first form and very good at Spanish.
    When Pepsi first visited, she sat, legs crossed, in Mama’s bedroom, chin in hand, conversing like an adult while Eartha Kitt sang
Under the Bridges of Paris with you, I’d make your dreams come true
. Pepsi sang too. She was only twelve. When lemonade was served she did not pour it herself but waited, sitting upright, for Perlita. Not that Perlita minded. She was used to this type of behaviour from the alien visitors on the estate and from beatniks (her best description of Pepsi). Pepsi sipped her lemonade, unlike Yvonne, who took great gulps. She retreated to the bedroom with Mama where she hovered like a nurse, pretending that Mama had had the baby. She ran and fetched, applied Johnson’s Baby Oil to all the places where it was to be applied, patted the pillows where they were to be patted and sighed with Mama as if she herself had