Behind the Scenes at the Museum Read Free

we had our first sip of tea before we have to attend to Gillian’s needs. For breakfast, Bunty cooks porridge, makes toast and boils eggs. George can’t stand porridge and likes bacon and sausage and fried bread but Bunty’s stomach is a little queasy this morning (I’m privy to all kinds of inside information). ‘So if he wants it he can get it himself,’ she mutters, doling out a bowlful of (rather lumpy) porridge for Gillian. Then she fills a second bowl for herself – she thinks she might manage a bit of porridge – and then a third bowl. Who can that be for? Goldilocks? Not for me surely? No, indeed not – for here’s a surprise – I have another sister! This is good news, even though she looks a little on the melancholic side. She’s already washed and dressed in her school uniform and even her hair – cut in a straight, rather unbecoming bob – is brushed. She is just five years old and her name is Patricia. Her plain little face has a somewhat dismal air as she regards the porridge in her bowl. This is because she hates porridge. Gillian is gobbling hers down like the greedy duck in her Ladybird book The Greedy Duck . ‘I don’t like porridge,’ Patricia ventures to Bunty. This is the first time she’s tried this direct approach over the porridge, usually she just turns it over and over with a spoon until it’s too late to eat it.
    ‘Pardon me?’ Bunty says, the words dropping like icicles on the linoleum of the kitchen floor (our mother’s not really a morning person).
    ‘I don’t like porridge,’ Patricia says, looking more doubtful now.
    As fast as a snake, Bunty hisses back, ‘Well I don’t like children, so that’s too bad for you, isn’t it?’ She’s joking, of course. Isn’t she?
    And why do I have this strange feeling, as if my shadow’s stitched to my back, almost as if there’s someone else in here with me? Am I being haunted by my own embryonic ghost?
    ‘Mind the shop, Bunt!’ (Bunt? This is even worse.)
    And then he’s gone. Just like that! Bunty fumes to herself – He might at least ask. ‘Would you mind, Bunty, minding the shop for me.’ And of course I would mind, very much. But I’d still have to do it, wouldn’t I? ‘Mind’ – why was it called ‘minding’? What kind of a mind did you need for standing behind a shop counter?
    Bunty doesn’t like the promiscuity of behind-the-counter contact. She feels that she’s not really selling dog food and kittens and the occasional budgerigar, but that she’s selling herself. At least, she thinks, when she worked for Mr Simon (‘Modelia – Ladies’ Quality Fashions’) it was sensible things they were selling, dresses and corsets and hats. What was sensible about a budgerigar? And, what’s more, having to be polite to everyone all the time wasn’t normal . (George, on the other hand, is born to it, chatting away, making the same remark about the weather twenty times in one morning, scraping and grovelling and smiling and then ripping off his mask as soon as he comes backstage. The children of shopkeepers – me and Chekhov, for example – are scarred by having witnessed their parents humiliate themselves in this distressing way.)
    Bunty decides that she’s going to have to say something to George, point out that she’s a wife and mother, not a shop assistant. And another thing, where does he go all the time? He’s always ‘slipping out’, off on mysterious errands. There are going to be some changes if Bunty has her way. She sits behind the counter clicking her number nine needles as if she’s a tricoteuse at George’s guillotine when she should be knitting my future – tiny little things, lacy shawls and matinée jackets with pink ribbons threaded through them. Magic red bootees to see me on my journey. The Shop Cat – a fat, brindled tabby that spends its days squatting malevolently on the counter – jumps up on her lap and she swiftly knocks it to the floor. Sometimes Bunty feels as if the