Pip

In all probability he certainly wouldn’t recognize Her if she came dressed as a clown: all stripy tights, mismatched lace-up shoes, a short frilly ra-ra skirt, pigtails sticking out starchily at odd angles. And a face powdered white, eyes delineated with black diamonds and star shapes; a comedy smile; a nose with a very red tip.

But there again, why would an artist like Pip fall for a chartered accountant?

In fact, how would their paths cross anyway?

They crossed the once, at Billy’s party. But by next year, Billy probably won’t want a clown. He’ll want to take a posse to the cinema. Or McDonald’s. Or both.

And so, when Zac came across Pip’s card a few days later, it had been through a hot wash, fast spin and tumble-dry. It was frayed and faded when he found it, half stuck to the back pocket of his jeans. He could just make out ‘Clown and Children’s Entertainer’. After some scrutiny, he reckoned the name was Merry Martha. The phone number remained legible. But he didn’t make a note of it and he put the card in his kitchen bin without another thought.

FOUR

Pip McCabe’s flat, like Zac’s, gives away little about the career of its owner. There’s nothing remotely zany or even vaguely theatrical about the interior. It’s neither colourful nor quirky. Though the basement flat is a small space, it doesn’t seem cramped on account of Pip’s aversion to clutter. No ornaments. The pictures on the walls are non-representational, frameless and subdued in colour. Photos held in stylish thick glass sandwiches are of her family, though Pip herself features in few. Pip’s home is an essay on calm; gradations of neutral hues for walls, floors and soft furnishings. The stripes and spots and frills and flounces and plastic and kitsch of her clowning – her clothes, her props, her funky chunky shoes – are immediately and neatly stored as soon as she returns from work. There’s never any leftover washing-up to be done. There’s never a damp towel left scrunched on the bathroom floor. The bed is made as soon as she’s left it. Not that it even looks that crumpled when she rises each morning.

Pip’s favourite drink is red wine. She doesn’t care for white, for champagne or for spirits. She likes a good Rioja best of all. And she has the utter confidence to happily drink it – and sometimes quite a lot of it – in her spic-and-spandom, with not one spillage to date. Maybe her training as an acrobat has something to do with it. At work, she flops and flaps and fools around but such japery is attributable to consummate physical control; at the centre of her slapstick and tumbling are balletic grace, athletic stability and acrobatic control.

When Pip McCabe is out and about, at work or at play, she is the life and soul, she’s the girl who gets things going, she tells the first joke, she’s the last to leave. When Pip McCabe is at home, however, she wafts around quietly with music playing softly. She’s happy with the solitude, confident with quiet, content in her own company. Alone in her flat, she provides the best audience in front of which she can truly be herself. She’s entertaining; she’s a children’s entertainer. But she’d really rather not entertain at home. Which was why Mike, her last steady boyfriend, left her. She never let him in. The door to her flat and entry to her heart remained closed.

She’s a great illusionist, is Pip McCabe. Her home isn’t Conran, none of her stuff is from stockists recommended by Elle Decoration. Rather, she has a cunning way with calico bought cheaply from Berwick Street and furniture bid for at Tring Auction Rooms. If she wasn’t a clown by trade, Pip could well earn her living as an invisible mender. However, that’s not to say there aren’t a couple of flaws, a little fraying, in her own fabric. But she’d rather keep them invisible and try to fix them in her own way and in her own time.

There are two nights a week when Pip would rather not be at home, absolutely never alone if she is. Tuesdays and Thursdays are exhausting for her though she works a maximum of four hours in the afternoons on these days and never as Merry Martha. Pip won’t ask for support, for help, for company, but she tries to ensure that her evenings on these days are occupied. Pizzas are good, movies are better, a fair few drinks in a raucous bar is the ultimate, watching Friends at a friend’s home will do and she has even been known on one or two occasions to have people round to hers, Rioja at the ready and comfort food aplenty. This Thursday she quite fancied seeing her sisters but Cat is in bed with flu and doesn’t want a visit, much less to provide company, and Fen is suddenly up in Derbyshire again, assessing sculpture in a private collection. Pip turned to her honorary sister instead.

‘Megan?’ she phoned.

‘Philippa McCabe,’ Megan responded, thinking to herself But of course, it’s Thursday. ‘I was going to call you. Do you want to do something?’

‘Sure,’ Pip said casually, as if she had only been phoning for a chat but Megan’s suggestion of meeting up was most appealing and how convenient that she herself happened to be free. ‘What do you fancy?’

‘To be honest,’ Megan said in a lascivious whisper, ‘I fancy a bit of Dominic. He’s the brother of Polly’s boyf, Max – you’ve met them. But I don’t think he’s on the menu tonight – so I’ll settle for pizza.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Pip laughed.

‘Or alcohol,’ Megan interjected excitedly, as if she’d overlooked its existence.

‘Either,’ said Pip.

‘Both!’ Megan declared and they arranged to meet at Smorfia in West Hampstead.

Pip settled down to a bath, dipping her body deep into the water, right up to her lower lip.

Wash the day away. Soothe. Cleanse. Breathe.

She closed her eyes on the day just been and what she had seen. She opened her eyes and stared at the taps. She could be in West Hampstead in less than half an hour.

The waiters flirted extravagantly with the two women. Megan was a regular and Pip had been often. The restaurant was small – friendly, noisy and smelt heavenly. Megan and Pip filched food from each other’s plates and chatted nineteen to the dozen, though on occasion this meant talking with their mouths full.

‘Was it tough today?’ Megan asked, tearing a much larger slice of Pip’s pizza than she’d intended.

‘It was,’ Pip confirmed, helping herself to Megan’s pappardelle, ‘particularly.’ Megan didn’t ask more and Pip didn’t elaborate. Pip enquired about this Dominic chap and Megan swooned off on elaborate tangents, describing potential wedding cake design and fantasy honeymoon destinations.

‘Has he asked you?’ Pip enquired.

‘Asked me what?’ Megan responded.

Pip thought about it. ‘Anything? Your favourite colour? If you snore? If you’ll marry him?’

Megan laughed heartily. ‘He hasn’t even asked me out yet,’ she admitted, raising her eyebrows at herself, ‘let alone kissed me, never mind asking me to marry him. But hey, I’ll live in hope. Or in day-dreamland at the very least.’

‘Well,’ said Pip, slightly histrionically due to a fast-flowing Chianti and a lot of garlic in the food, ‘if you ask me, day-dreams endanger reality.’

‘You’re too bloody cynical for your own good,’ Megan pouted, ‘and for mine.’

‘No, I’m not,’ Pip protested, ‘I’m just sensibly circumspect.’

‘Bollocks!’ Megan retorted, because Pip was her best friend so she was allowed to. ‘Your mum ran off with a cowboy when you were a kid and bang! you don’t believe in true love!’

Pip chewed thoughtfully. ‘I’m fine about love. I just don’t trust men with a penchant for rhinestones and rodeos!’

They chinked glasses and laughed.

Megan picked a large glistening black olive from her friend’s pizza, scrutinizing it admiringly before popping it into her mouth. Pip mopped at Megan’s sauce with some leftover bruschetta. ‘The thing about love,’ she said with her mouth full, ‘is that it requires one to get naked.’

Megan looked a little blank. ‘Well, if you leave your clothes on, you tend to get a little messy.’

‘But that’s my point,’ said Pip. ‘Once you’ve laid yourself bare, it often becomes messier.’

Megan looked baffled.

‘Reveal?’ Pip said first, tipping her head one way. ‘Or conceal?’ she continued, tipping her head the other way. ‘I guess I’d rather keep covered up than expose myself.’

‘But you have a great physique,’ Megan protested artlessly.

‘I’m talking metaphorically,’ Pip laughed. ‘God, I forget you work in numbers not words.’

‘Being a maths teacher doesn’t make me an emotional moron,’ Megan sulked – but not seriously.

‘Of course not,’ Pip said, ‘but you do fall in love too easily and you get hurt.’ Over the years, Pip had witnessed Megan in pieces several times. Privately, Pip felt Megan’s experience in terms of quantity and variety thus counted for little; certainly it hadn’t paved the way to happy-ever-after. Pip found it difficult to fathom how someone who had been badly burnt by love’s flame could continue to thrust herself into the fire.

Megan pouted through Pip’s silence but was quietly relieved that Pip was keeping her misgivings to herself. Megan topped up their wineglasses and winked lasciviously. ‘Well, I bet you I’ve had more fun and frolics than you with your “I don’t need a man” bollocks.’

‘But I don’t!’ Pip attempted to proclaim though it was met with another energetic ‘Bollocks!’ from Megan. ‘Seriously,’ Pip remonstrated.

‘Well,’ Megan said, ‘just as well, then, isn’t it? Because working as a clown called Merry Martha doesn’t really make you millions and dressing like a clown called Merry Martha really isn’t going to have the men flocking. At least, no male over the age of eight.’

‘Ouch!’ Pip winced theatrically because she didn’t want Megan to know that her words had actually confronted her more than anticipated. Megan had meant no malice. Like many around Pip, Megan had become used to her friend shunning romance, wealth and the panoply of either. And, like those closest to Pip, Megan knew Pip would actually benefit from a little of each.

‘Share a pudding?’ Pip suggested, changing the subject.

‘How about share each other’s – order one each? Asking me to choose between pannacotta and tiramisu would be the same as asking me to choose between George Clooney and Brad Pitt.’

‘Hmm,’ Pip mused, ‘I was going to choose fruit salad.’

‘You’re just trying to be wholesome!’ Megan said astutely. ‘Live a little!’ Soon enough, she was swooning over desserts and Dominic in equal measures.

‘I hope it happens for you,’ Pip said sincerely whilst wielding her spoon with gay abandon between the two bowls. ‘He sounds lovely. And suitable.’ Megan raised her glass and her eyebrow. ‘Thing is,’ Pip said, because the wine was enabling her to do so, ‘I say I don’t need money because, in truth, I’ve never wanted – let alone needed – anything I can’t afford.’ She sipped contemplatively. ‘I like bargain hunting. I rather like doing upholstery. I get a kick out of people asking “Heals?” and me saying “Hell no, house clearance”.’ Megan spooned the last of the pannacotta into Pip’s mouth. ‘And I say I don’t need a man,’ Pip continued, ‘because I’ve never felt for someone enough to really feel that life wouldn’t make sense without them.’ She ran her finger around the tiramisu bowl though their spoons had already scraped at practically every vestige of the dessert. ‘I guess,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I’ve managed to reach the grand old age of thirty without ever being in love.’

Megan contemplated this. She chinked glasses with Pip. ‘You know what, McCabe,’ she said, ‘to be honest, that’s no bad thing.’ Megan sighed. ‘Sometimes being in love is more hassle than it’s worth. Way too costly.’

Deep down, that’s what Pip had long had a hunch about. ‘You see, for me,’ she said, pouring the last of the second bottle of wine into their glasses, ‘there are nice blokes like good old Mike for every now and then. And in between times,’ she whispered, eyes wide for dramatic effect, ‘there are vibrators.’

Megan shrieked with laughter. The other diners turned and stared.

Pip snorted into her wine. Paulo, the young waiter, had eavesdropped the conversation. He decided it prudent and hopefully profitable to present the girls with complimentary Sambucas.

‘You get what you settle for,’ Pip murmured softly. It was the early hours of Friday morning when Pip finally decided to go to bed. She’d been sitting up with a bottle of Evian, waiting for her living-room to stop revolving at such an alarming rate. ‘If I settle for anything less, I’ll be the one who pays.’ The revolutions of the room had slowed to approximately three per minute. ‘Anyway, you don’t enter your thirties without a fair weight of baggage from your twenties. And I’m not having someone else’s dumped on me. I’m absolutely not unpacking it for them. I don’t do baggage and that’s that, really. Simple.’ The room was settling nicely into one revolution per minute. ‘Vibrators it is, then.’

The room is stationary. And silent. The Evian is finished and Pip feels hydrated enough to see what lying down feels like. ‘Friday Friday,’ she says to herself, trying to recall her timetable as she walks through to her bedroom.

Face painting at Golders Hill Park, lunch-time. Party in Chalk Farm at tea-time.

You could have a lie-in, Pip.

Me? God, no. If I have spare time, why on earth fill it with doing nothing? I have loads to do. I can find loads to do.

Can you face being horizontal?

Let me see. Not too bad.

Are you all right in the dark?

Yes. I’m not afraid of the dark.

Pip is in bed. Lying still in the dark. She loves her bedroom. No clutter. Walls the colour of oyster mushrooms. Thick curtains the colour of crème caramel and behind them, cream roller blinds at the window the colour of cappuccino froth. She bought the blinds in the Habitat sale; the curtains were a freebie from a set-designer friend of hers. They had been on a BBC costume drama and had required a fair bit of deft needlework from Pip. The blisters and pricked fingertips had been a small price to pay for such hallowed curtains. She laid the carpet herself. It doesn’t quite fit but her strategically placed furniture hides this from view. It looks like sisal but is much kinder to bare feet. The massive rusty stain that enabled Pip to purchase it for less than a quarter of the price is conveniently straddled by her bed. Her bed has a birch, Shaker-style headboard, very simply panelled and beautifully made. She picked that up for next to nothing as it had a split right through it. But she worked with wood filler and sandpaper and stain; it took her a month, but now you can’t see the join.

However, what she loves most of all about her bedroom is something she had to pay full price for – indeed, over the odds – and that is the remarkable quiet considering her flat’s proximity to Kentish Town Road. This had cost her the asking price for the flat two years ago. Though most of her pennies go straight towards the mortgage and Camden Council’s absurdly high council tax, she doesn’t begrudge a penny. It might be a small space subdivided by stud walls, but it is her own place, her haven, and she loves it.

Pip submits herself to the stillness and silence and stares upwards to where the ceiling ought to be though she can’t determine its surface in the darkness. She tells herself it is now Friday, that Thursday was indeed yesterday. But in effect, it still feels very much Thursday that she is closing her eyes and going to sleep from. Right now, her evening with Megan doesn’t seem as current as the afternoon preceding it. Sure, Megan and she talked about life, love and the universe. And vibrators. But none have the resonance of her afternoon.

‘Night-night, little ones,’ she says out loud, ‘see you next week.’

FIVE

George Saunders is nine years old. He is into his sixth month on Reynolds, the renal ward at St Beatrix’s, the children’s hospital in the City affectionately known at St Bea’s. He’s uncomfortable and fed up. And now he’s agreed to having his eyes tested because they’re about the only part of him that haven’t been tested. He thinks they’re fine. But he wouldn’t be surprised if they’re poorly. Everything else seems to be.

‘Well, here we go, then,’ the doctor says. ‘Cover your left eye – that’s right – what? Yes, I know it’s your left one – I said that’s right, right? Good, use that hand, right? Or that one, left – we’re not testing your hands, are we? Right. Left! Whatever. Ho-hum. Just shut that eye and tell me what’s written on this card.’

George stares at the card held in front of him.

i

‘i,’ says George.

The doctor is making those stern contemplative muttering sounds that they are famous for. ‘Right. Now please cover your right eye with the other hand. Lovely. Can you tell me what’s written on this card?’ Another card is held in front of George. He looks at it, then looks at the doctor. He really doesn’t want to smile but invisible magnets haul the corners of his mouth up towards the mobiles dangling from the ward’s ceiling. He reads the card again.

I

‘Um, i,’ he says, stifling a giggle.

The doctor looks at him sternly. Regards his mother, too. And nods sagely at the ward sister who is hovering. ‘I declare that there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with this young man’s “i”s,’ the doctor says. And then the doctor takes out a hammer and starts bashing George’s arms. George giggles as the hammer makes funny beeps and dongs on impact. After all, the tool is made of red and yellow plastic and is light as a feather. ‘Now look what you’ve gone and done!’ the doctor chastises. ‘Nurse! Nurse! Quick, call the doctor! My nose! My nose!’

The nurse laughs. ‘Incurable!’ she declares and walks away.

George is smiling widely. The doctor’s nose, bright red at the best of times, is flashing. ‘Quick!’ George is told. ‘Give me your bed and your tubes and those things that do all that bleeping – I need them more than you!’

‘Are you coming back next week?’ he asks, very interested in the stickers the doctor has just given him, having magicked them from behind George’s ear.

The doctor regards the young patient. ‘Yes. I reckon so. Perhaps. If I can switch my nose off.’

‘Brill,’ says George. ‘See you then, Dr Pippity. Bye!’

‘Good aftermorning,’ says Dr Pippity, clicking her heels together and saluting so clumsily that she clonks herself in the eye. Her nose continues to glow on and off. She points at her gift of stickers: ‘Don’t eat them all at once!’ she declares. She turns from George and walks away, jauntily, with a peculiar skip every step or so. ‘Pippitypippity,’ she mutters as she goes. ‘Pip. Pip. Good aftermorning!’ She settles herself quietly into a chair by the bedside of a small girl who feels too poorly to move, let alone speak. But, in a glance, Dr Pippity clocks a glimmer of welcome in the girl’s eyes. So we’ll leave her sitting there awhile, performing simple and silly tricks. She’s carefully placed a magic wand in the little girl’s hand. It’s one of those trick sticks that segments and collapses. Dr Pippity is feigning frustration with her bedridden assistant. Who, in turn, now has eyes that hint at a sparkle.

The shift is over. Dr Pippity is exhausted but as she makes her way to the small room she uses to change in, she skips and ‘pip pip’s everyone she passes; the sounds of squeaks and bells emanating at random from any of her many pockets; her nose lighting up every now and then, apparently much to her consternation.

Her changing-room is basically a glorified cupboard along a corridor on the ground floor. Dr Pippity doesn’t mind. There’s a sink. A small table to prop her mirror on. A stool. She removes her nose. She takes off her slap and in doing so, emotionally wipes away the tougher parts of her day. She hums softly as she unbraids her hair from the taut pigtails. Her scalp feels both sore and relieved. She runs her fingers through her hair, amused, as always, by the kinks and curls that will take a few hours, if not a wash and blow-dry, to calm down. It proves to her that her naturally straight hair suits her best. It still amuses her to remember how she longed for a perm in her teenage years and how she cursed Django who forbade it. The hippy in him, however, was happy for her to experiment with henna (‘If it’s herbal it’s harmless! If it’s organic don’t panic!’ being one of his favourite maxims). Unfortunately, henna turned her mid-mousy brown to garish barmaid orange in the space of half an hour. It took half a year to dull down and fade. Pip has decided to be at peace with her natural colour ever since. She keeps her cut softly layered and shoulder length. It may be mousy and straight, but it’s glossy and frames her face becomingly, crowning her features well.

From her doctor’s coat pockets she lays out the tools of her trade and wipes everything with antiseptic cloths. A comedy stethoscope. Five different types of magic wand. Small red foam balls that, with a little surreptitious rubbing between the palms, or a heartfelt ‘abracadabra’ from a child, metamorphose into a selection of miniature animals. A huge pair of plastic scissors. Handfuls of stickers. The squeaking plastic hammer. She takes off her doctor’s coat. It’s a real doctor’s coat, in thick white cotton, but embellished with colourful patterns on the pockets and with her name, ‘Dr Pippity’, emblazoned on the back like some kind of patchwork tattoo. An intricate circuit and a couple of AAA batteries enable her to make the squeaks and dongs. She takes off her luridly striped pinafore, with the flowers on springs attached to the kangaroo-style pouch, the badges dotted here and there with ‘I am 8’ and ‘smile’ and various cartoon characters. She peels off her tights – she customized this pair so that one leg has multicoloured dots and the other has wriggling lines. She showed them off that afternoon, very forlornly, to a girl with no hair up on Gainsborough, the cancer ward.

‘I’ve not got no hair no more,’ the child had told her. Dr Pippity had sat beside her and stretched her legs out. ‘This leg here,’ she showed the girl, ‘has the multicoloured measles.’ The girl gingerly placed a finger over the spots to check. ‘And this leg here,’ Dr Pippity declared, ‘has worms!’ She’d been able to muster a giggle from the girl. The girl hadn’t giggled for days. It felt good. For Dr Pippity. For the nurses. For the children in the beds to either side. But especially for the little girl with cancer and no hair. And she was the point.

‘And that’s the point,’ Dr Pippity says as she takes off her tights and puts on a pair of navy socks instead. ‘That’s my job.’

The clothes and the bits and pieces that accessorize Dr Pippity are placed carefully into a really rather dull beige holdall. Pip checks her reflection and wipes away a smudge of slap that she’d missed. She pops her mirror into her bag, tucks her white shirt into her jeans and leaves the room, closing the door quietly. Not that there’s anyone to disturb. The wards are all upstairs. She walks through the main entrance, not now recognized by anyone, though many of them would know her at forty paces in her slap and motley.

Zac did a swift double take when Pip passed him, but he didn’t linger or even look back. Over the years, he has known so many people at the hospital – as faces, or as names, too, or even well enough for a quick conversation – that he doesn’t think to try and place Pip. He’s got things on his mind, anyway. So has she, she didn’t notice him at all.

‘Fen? It’s me.’

‘Hiya, Pip.’ The sisters chatted on their mobile phones as they left work; Fen walking away from Tate Britain, her older sister hovering near the ambulance bay.

‘Fancy a film?’ Pip asked, pronouncing it ‘fill-erm’ as is a McCabe tradition. But Fen explained she had ‘a bit of a date’ and would Pip mind awfully therefore if she didn’t. ‘A bit of a date?’ Pip teased. ‘Which bit – just the arms and torso of some poor sod? Oh, for God’s sake, tell me it’s a real hunk, not just a hunk of sculpture you’ve fallen for.’