I’m four and a half, somehow living with Mum in a bed-sit at 21 Landsowne Road, halfway between Thora’s and her Dad’s. She has two rooms to herself with a grubby bathroom we have to share, halfway down a flight of stairs on the next landing.
Here I witness the secrets of her female life, like the way she puts on lipstick, squeezing the lips together to spread it out evenly. She giggles because I am looking while she does it.
– The tiresome thing about nylons is getting the seams straight up the back of the leg, she complains, sitting on one the edge of her bed.
She pulls a stocking over her hand and up her arm.
– What are you doing?
– Checking for ladders or a hole in the toe.
A concentrated look, then she concertinas it up in her hands, keeping a thumb in each side, carefully feeding it over her long toes. She pulls the stocking up her leg, checking the seam is straight before attaching her suspenders to the top. She lifts her skirt and I see the white tops of her legs.
More dramatic, every now and then, she heats up a brown liquid in a battered old saucepan. We are still in her bedroom.
– What’s that? I say scrunching my nose up against the smell.
– Wax, she replies, spreading a dollop of the hot brown liquid over her shin with a wooden ice-cream spoon.
– What’s it for?
More is going on.
– Questions, questions, questions, she says, fanning her leg, leaving it to cool.
She teases her finger nail under the stiffened solution and rips it off in a movement so sudden it makes me flinch. An awful sound as the wax pulls the hairs out of the leg. It hurts so much she has to rip it off very fast like I will do one day with an old plaster on a hairy spot.
– Right, that’s that done, she says, tidying up her tools.
On her dressing table, a huge jar of white cream. She spoons it out with cupped fingers onto her red leg, gently strokes it in till it disappears.
– You can feel now, she says.
I love to stroke her smoothened leg.
Categories: People
Leave a Reply